Ra Paulette – cave artist
An evening pause: He doesn’t draw art in caves, he carves the cave itself.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Year: 2015
Senate Republicans call for gas tax hike
Lying slime: A number of Senate Republicans have joined with Democrats to call for an increase in the gas tax.
Though the last time the gas tax was increased was during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the only reason the highway fund is short of money is that they don’t spend it wisely, wasting a lot on stupid projects. (Sounds a lot like almost everything the federal government does, doesn’t it?) Rather than increase the tax, Congress should take a close look at how the money is being spent, and clamp down.
I should note that House Republicans have already said that they will oppose this increase. Whether they stay that course however remains to be seen.
“It’s time to stop lying.”
Link here.
Take a stab at guessing who is lying, and about what.
California newspaper vandalized for defying pro-immigration groups
Fascists: A California newspaper has been vandalized because of its insistence on describing illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants”.
The Santa Barbara News-Press’s front entrance was sprayed with the message “The border is illegal, not the people who cross it” in red paint, sometime either Wednesday night or early Thursday, according to the newspaper’s director of operations, Donald Katich. The attack came amid wider objections to a News-Press headline that used the word “illegals” alongside a story on California granting driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally.
So will someone explain to me how these pro-immigration vandals are any different from the Islamic terrorists who murdered the cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo?
In truth, they are only different in their scale of violence. The pro-immigration vandals have not yet risen to the level of the Islamic terrorists, but give them time, give them time. Anyone who thinks violence and destruction is acceptable to prove their point will eventually decide that murder is acceptable as well.
Airbus-Safran demand total control of Arianespace
The heat of competition: The European joint-venture between Airbus and Safran is now demanding that be given total control of Arianespace and the development of the new Ariane 6 rocket.
From Airbus’ perspective, the production of rockets in Europe should be done the same way commercial Airbus aircraft are built. “The launcher business in Europe in the beginning of 2014 was one in which the vehicles were designed by government agencies, commercialized by a company called Arianespace, produced by an ensemble of companies, and then launched by Arianespace. This is not an optimal situation,” [Airbus strategy director Marwan] Lahoud said.
“The optimal solution is to industrialize the process, with one prime contractor that designs, builds, sells and operates the launchers, with a supply chain — much as we do with Airbus today.”
Essentially, this would be a shift in ownership of the rocket, moving from the government to the private company. We have seen the same process in the U.S., with the new commercial space products no longer controlled or designed by NASA. The result has been lower cost, faster development, and greater profits.
Travel posters for alien worlds
NASA has produced retro-style travel posters for three alien exoplanets which you can download and print.
The posters are quite cool, which is not surprising, considering that, in the past four decades, the best interplanetary travel that NASA has been able to achieve has been its graphic power-point and pr images. Unfortunately, for NASA actually going there has not been so easy.
Comparing the weather on Mars and Earth
Heh: It is currently warmer in Gale Crater on Mars than in many parts of the United States.
Obviously those SUVs on Mars are causing the warming there. Obviously.
New York Times explains why it won’t publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons
Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?
Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.
Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.
An update on the on-going ebola outbreak in Africa
The Centers for Disease Control today released graphs detailing the on-going ebola epidemic in West Africa.
What is significant about all the graphs at the link is that there is no sign of a let up or an easing of the epidemic. The numbers are still rising, even if the increase has slowed somewhat.
9 of the 10 worst countries for Christian persecution are Islamic
The religion of peace: A new assessment of Christian persecution worldwide has found that of the top ten most religiously oppressive nations nine are Islamic.
North Korea tops the list, but the rest are all countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. The report also found that “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries on the 2015 World Watch List.”
I wonder what these facts tell us? Anyone care to venture a guess? Maybe we should condemn Israel for this oppression? Yeah, that makes sense!
Paul Kelly – Careless
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
Ancient fossils on Mars?
A close look at features on the Martian surface seen by Curiosity suggests to one scientist the presence of ancient fossils of carpet-like microbiology.
On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and costal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.
Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.
In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.
Noffke is very careful in her analysis. She doesn’t claim any proofs, only that her expert eye sees the same things on both planets. Most intriguing.