The competition heats up: With its most recent glide test on Saturday it appears SpaceShipTwo has successfully fulfilled its glide engineering goals. Hat tip Clark Lindsay at NewSpace Watch. To quote their flight summary:
With this latest round of six flights we have cleared the full glide-flight envelope for airspeed, angle-of-attack, CG, and structural loads!
More horrors revealed: Mitt Romney once ran a Nazi torture cult! And that’s not all. Click the link for more.
Thank God we have a vigilant press to find out these important facts, before the election.
An evening pause: The music is good, but the dance choreography is fascinatingly original.
The choice of the electorate in November: “Are they prepared to listen to reasoned arguments articulated by Ryan about the need for entitlement reform, or will they succumb to simplistic liberal cant about pushing grandma over the cliff?”
Sadly, at this moment in the campaign we don’t know what the electorate will do. What we do know is that the Democrats are going to use some of the most absurd, hateful, and despicable attacks against both Romney and Ryan, as they did in 2008 against Sarah Palin and have so far against Romney. It is their idea of civility.
The Houston Chronicle today has an editorial entitled “Let’s bring logic to NASA’s budget process” which describes and supports a bill introduced by two Republican Congressmen which would
model NASA’s budget process after that used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Doing so would make the agency less political and more professional. It calls for the president to appoint the NASA director to a 10-year term and would make the budget cycle multiyear rather than annual.
The editorial also quotes sponsor Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Virginia) as explaining the goal of the bill is ” to take the politics out of NASA … and create continuity in the space agency.”
Bah. The last thing I want is to take the politics out of NASA’s operations.
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An evening pause: Performed live, 1970.
It’s official. Romney has picked Paul Ryan has his running mate.
It appears that at 8:45 am tomorrow (Saturday) Mitt Romney will name his vice presidential pick, and the rumors are saying it will be Paul Ryan.
If so, this will be further evidence that Romney is serious about dealing with the out-of-control federal budget. Of all the elected officials in Congress, Paul Ryan is probably the most educated and clear-headed about the budget situation, and has been willing to put his political head on the chopping block to take risks to deal with the problem. He is also one of the most articulate, intelligent, and thoughtful politicians I have seen in years. He will run rings around Joe Biden in any debate.
The only negative I see for this pick is that it will take Ryan out of the House, where he was in a position to wield a great deal of influence on budget matters. As vice-president he will not have as much power.
I’ve embedded below the fold a video of Paul Ryan describing clearly the budget problems posed by Obamacare during the White House summit called by President Obama. It is only one example, but it is worth watching to gauge the merits of this man. Also, read this long article on Ryan’s background and history.
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An evening pause: The wonderful 2012 Grammy awards performance.
Watch the first test flight live this weekend of Copenhagen Suborbitals’ manned capsule launch abort system.
If all goes as planned, the Launch Escape System will rocket [the capsule dubbed Beautiful] Betty and Randy [the crash dummy] from a seafaring launch platform, loft them to a height between 2,620 and 3,280 feet and then splash down in the Baltic Sea. At that point self-inflating bags will emerge from Betty and right the floating spacecraft.
The CIA has now declassified the story behind their effort in 1971 and 1972 to recover a satellite film canister from 16,400 feet below sea level in the Pacific.
Using Google Earth, a researcher in North Carolina thinks she has discovered two lost pyramid sites in Egypt.
The researcher’s website, Google Earth Anomalies, is intriguing. It focuses on identifying strange and unexplained features that are seen in Google Earth, such as circular and linear features where none should exist. Often these are artifacts of software processing. Sometimes, as in the Egyptian case above, they are not.
Dawn has begun its slow departure from Vesta in anticipation of its journey to the solar system’s largest asteroid, Ceres.
The departure was actually announced two weeks ago, but since this is a very slow process it isn’t like we have missed anything. Dawn’s ion engines are very efficient, but they work at a very leisurely pace. It will take a month for the engine’s thrusters to push Dawn out of its orbit around Vesta.
Time to party! Tomorrow will mark 1200 days since the Senate, led by the Democrats, passed their last budget.
We’re here to help you! The boy whose hot dog stand was shut down by a local government ten minutes after it opened is now homeless.
We’re here to help you: The police raid the wrong house, kill the family’s dog, handcuff the children and make them sit next to the carcass, ransack the house, and then arrest the father for possession of a handgun found during the illegal search.
Other than that, this raid was a picture-perfect example of good police work.
The family is suing of course. Interestingly, the Obama administration is likely to be on the side of the police.
Since the DEA is named in the suit, the Francos’ legal team will likely find itself going head-to-head with Obama administration lawyers, who argued a similar case earlier this year before the Ninth Circuit. Short recap of the proceedings: The DOJ sought a summary dismissal of a lawsuit filed against seven DEA agents for their rough treatment of a family of four–mother, father, two very young daughters–during a wrong-door raid conducted during the Bush administration. The Ninth Circuit, denied the DOJ’s request for a summary dismissal, and drew a bright line between how adults are treated during raids, and how children are treated during raids.
“Ignore the prophets of doom – this is a golden age for the world.”
Take global poverty, a subject we have heard plenty about from ministers justifying the £9 billion overseas aid budget. Britain has signed up to the so-called Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 and accompanied by sermons from Gordon Brown about the “arc of the moral universe” bending towards justice. It was the beginning of boom times for the overseas aid industry, despite its woeful track record. The first goal was to halve the proportion of the world’s population living on a dollar a day by 2015 – an undeniably noble aim.
Earlier this year, the World Bank made an astonishing discovery: the target had actually been met in 2008, seven years ahead of schedule. This staggering achievement received no fanfare, perhaps because the miracle had not been created by Western governments but by the economic progress of China and India. Their embrace of capitalism had invited a flow of trade and investment, which was not halted by the crash. Capitalism meant that houses replaced mud huts and vast swathes of the Third World rose from their agrarian knees. British consumers buying cheap shirts in Asda were, in a very real sense, helping to make poverty history. [emphasis mine]
In other words, poor countries became wealthy by embracing freedom, not centralized government rule.
Sadly, the United States still faces economic disaster, and that is because, in the past half century, our culture abandoned its principles of freedom and capitalism and instead put our faith in big government. The result: we now face bankruptcy and economic collapse.
How Curiosity’s nuclear power plant works.
Interesting factoid: The tread of Curiosity’s tires will leave behind an imprint that reads “JPL,” only it is written in Morse code, not plain English.
