25 Signs That The Financial World Is About To Hit The Big Red Panic Button
The day of reckoning looms: Twenty-five signs that the financial world is about to hit the big red panic button.
Year: 2011
Juno looks back and sees the Earth and the Moon
Juno, on its way to Jupiter, took a look back and snapped this picture of the Earth/Moon double planet.
The image was taken by the spacecraft’s camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away.
Gives us a glimpse at what our home planet will really look like to future spacefarers, either on they way out or on their way home.
G-Male by Google
Star goes boom, telescopes zoom
NASA Names Astrophysics Fellowship For Nancy Roman, one of the key people behind the Hubble Space Telescope
NASA has named an astrophysics fellowship in honor of Nancy Roman, who helped design and build the Hubble Space Telescope.
More information on why the Soyuz-U rocket failed
More details on why the rocket carrying the Progress freighter to ISS failed last week.
Ground controllers replace a failed circuit box on ISS, using the robot Dextre
Ground controllers successfully replaced a failed circuit box on ISS this weekend, using the two-armed Dextre robot.
Up to now, exchanging the boxes was done by spacewalkers, which always carries a certain level of risk. Dextre was designed to reduce the need for astronauts to conduct spacewalks for routine maintenance, therefore freeing up the crew’s time for more important activities, like conducting science.
Police confiscate a woman’s legal guns, refuse to return them
Fire them! Police confiscate a woman’s legal guns, then refuse to return them despite admitting they are legally owned.
Her cache [of weapons] somehow caught the attention of Lakewood Police, who paid a visit last September. When they found Rice wasn’t home, they asked an obliging employee of the complex to open up the apartment without her consent. Once inside, they raided the gun rack, making off with 13 firearms worth around $15,000. The only problem: They had no apparent reason to. [emphasis mine]
Not only did the police essentially steal her property, they entered her apartment illegally.
New San Francisco Bay Bridge nears completion
New San Francisco Bay Bridge nears completion.
If ISS becomes unmanned, the first test of Dragon will also be delayed
More possible consequences if ISS becomes unmanned: the first test of Dragon will be delayed.
An unmanned ISS will also delay the first launch in February of Orbital Sciences Cyngus cargo vehicle, as this vehicle is like Dragon in that it requires astronauts on board ISS to control the robot arm that grabs and berths the spacecraft.
National Labor Relations Board tells a church university it’s not religious
Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has now told a Catholic university it is not religious enough to be exempt from union organizing, even though the Supreme Court has ruled the board has no right to do any such thing.
Indiana school vouchers prompt thousands to flee public schools
Competition wins: A new Indiana school vouchers program has prompted thousands to flee public schools.
A preliminary cause for the Russian launch failure has been found
Good news: The Russians have pinned down a preliminary cause for the Progress launch failure last week.
Solving this quickly appears essential, as the space station was not really designed to fly unmanned.
Past NASA risk assessments show there is a one in 10 chance of losing the station within six months if astronauts and cosmonauts are not onboard to deal with any critical systems failures. The probability soars to a frightening one in two chance — a 50-percent probability — if the station is left without a crew for a year.
Alison Krauss and Yo Yo Ma – Slumber my darling
An evening pause: a song by Stephen Foster.
Al Gore and the silencing of debate
Yesterday I posted a link to a story about Al Gore claiming that any expression of skepticism about global warming is to him no different than racism. Here again is what Gore said,
“There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won. We have to win the conversation on climate.”
More than at any other time, Gore here has very successfully illustrated the differences between how climate skeptics debate the scientific questions of climate change versus how global warming advocates do it.
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Russians delay next manned launch to ISS
It’s now official: The Russians will postpone the launch of the next crew to ISS, as well as delaying the return of one crew presently on board.
New EPA regulations will shut down 8 percent of U.S. power generation capability
We’re here to help you! New EPA regulations threaten to shut down 8 percent of all U.S. power generation capability.
Nor should this be a surprise. During the campaign Obama admitted, but few reported, how he wanted to bankrupt any power plants that used coal to generate power.
An overview of the space war situation by Clark Lindsey
Clark Lindsey has written a very nice and short summary of the present political battles over NASA’s budget and its future manned space rockets.
Power still out
Update: Power finally returned at about 11:50 pm Sunday.
Power is still out here in DC (as of 11:43 pm Sunday), so my posting must remain light.
Why it takes Pepco so long to restore power to our area, and why this seems to happen ever time there is a storm of any kind, remains a very annoying mystery to me.
Big Sky Country – A Montana night sky time lapse
An evening pause: In Glacier National Park in August 2011. From Mark “Indy” Kochte.