For the past two years NASA and JPL have been under heavy hacker attack from China, according to NASA’s inspector general.
For the past two years NASA and JPL have been under heavy hacker attack from China, according to NASA’s inspector general.
For the past two years NASA and JPL have been under heavy hacker attack from China, according to NASA’s inspector general.
An evening pause: Man, can these people play and sing. Vocals: Michelle Wright, Iris DeMent, Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh. Fiddles: Jay Ungar, Aly Bain. Mandolin: Russ Barenberg. Bouzouki: Donal Lunny. Accordion: Phil Cunningham. Guitar: Molly Mason.
Irresponsible: An email from the Obama administration confirms their effort to make the sequester cuts as painful as possible, even if it isn’t necessary.
The competition heats up: Scaled Composites has done its first test firing of SpaceShipTwo’s engine.
No word yet on the test result, unfortunately.
Touching the underground ocean of Europa, from Earth.
The search to find and understand the Chelyabinsk meteorite.
Finding out what’s in it: The CEO of a major health insurance company warned that rates will likely go up 20% to 100% next year because of Obamacare.
Someone’s lying: One week before the sequester cuts took effect, the TSA issued a $50 million contract for new uniforms.
I find these quotes from the article most interesting:
The TSA employs 50,000 security officers, inspectors, air marshals and managers. That means that the uniform contract will pay the equivalent of $1,000 per TSA employee over the course of the year.
…
The TSA provides uniforms to new employees, but requires its employees to buy their own replacements. βYou will be measured for your new uniforms at your first orientation session,β the fact sheet says. βTSA will provide your initial uniform issue consisting of 3 long sleeve shirts, 3 short sleeve shirts, 2 pairs of trousers, 2 ties, and one belt, sweater, socks, and jacket.β
$1,000 per uniform? And only for first time employees? At a time Janet Napolitano is claiming they will be forced to lay off workers because of sequestration? As I said, someone is lying. Or they are so incompetent words fail me.
Curiosity is easing out of safe mode as engineers switch computers.
An evening pause:
Stating the obvious to the press: “Investigate them.”
It is that time again! Today, March 4, NOAA released its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle, covering the period of February 2013. As I do every month, I am posting this latest graph, with annotations to give it context, below the fold.
Once again, the Sun has shown a complete inability to produce sunspots, at the very moment it had been predicted to be rising towards its maximum in the sunspot cycle. The numbers in February plunged from the tepid rise we saw in January to below the crash we saw in December. Right now, when the Sun is supposed to peaking, it is instead producing sunspots in numbers as low as seen in 2011, at the very end of the last solar minimum.
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