Link here. The story discusses in detail some of the negotiations that appear to be going in the background within the Republican caucus, all focused on the possibility that Speaker John Boehner could be driven out sometime this fall. It also indicates that the more conservative wing of the Republican Party is pushing the issue, and no matter what happens, is likely to have greater influence in the coming months.
Finding out what’s in it: An Obamacare provision to Medicare is instead penalizing hospitals that care for poorer and sicker patients.
The provision penalizes hospitals that have a high readmission rate. What it doesn’t consider is that some hospitals focus on poorer and sicker patients, who also have a higher readmission rate. Obamacare then punishes them for doing so.
But remember! The Democrats and Obama care! What matter if the policies and laws they pass cause harm to the most helpless citizens. What really matters is that we vote for Democrats over and over and over again, no matter how many times they prove to us that their ideas are incredibly foolish.
Victory for free speech: A federal judge has ruled that a man’s first amendment rights were violated when he was arrested because he wrote profanity-laced objections on his speeding ticket payment letter.
This what these fascists in the small town of Liberty, New York did:
On May 4, 2012, Barboza, then 22, was driving through the small, scenic town of Liberty when he was given a speeding ticket. Clearly sore about the incident, Barboza crossed out “Liberty” on the payment form and replaced it with “Tyranny.” He then scrawled the offending phrase across the top, pleaded guilty to speeding and put the form in the mail.
Justice Brian P. Rourke informed Barboza in September of that year that his payment had been rejected and he’d have to make the two-hour trek from Connecticut to appear in court. There, Rourke lectured Barboza over his use of foul language, before prosecutors from the Sullivan County district attorney’s office instructed police officers to arrest Barboza on a charge of aggravated harassment. Barboza was taken to the Liberty police station, where he was booked, fingerprinted and handcuffed to a bench. After being shuffled between courts, he was eventually released when he paid a $200 bail.
The new ruling makes the DA liable for damages. The town of Liberty will also have to “stand trial for failing to train police officers regarding the First Amendment,”
Using data from seven years of flybys by Cassini of Enceladus scientists now think they have confirmed the existence of a global ocean of liquid water beneath the moon’s icy crust.
Cassini scientists analyzed more than seven years’ worth of images of Enceladus taken by the spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since mid-2004. They carefully mapped the positions of features on Enceladus — mostly craters — across hundreds of images, in order to measure changes in the moon’s rotation with extreme precision. As a result, they found Enceladus has a tiny, but measurable wobble as it orbits Saturn. Because the icy moon is not perfectly spherical — and because it goes slightly faster and slower during different portions of its orbit around Saturn — the giant planet subtly rocks Enceladus back and forth as it rotates.
The team plugged their measurement of the wobble, called a libration, into different models for how Enceladus might be arranged on the inside, including ones in which the moon was frozen from surface to core. “If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be,” said Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating scientist at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core,” he said.
Previous data had suggested a lens-shaped ocean under the south pole. This new data suggests the ocean in global.
As always, the possibility of liquid water suggests the possibility of life. None has been found, but with water and energy it is certainly possible.
The competition heats up: In a press conference today, Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin announced that his company will be making Cape Canaveral, Florida, its launchpad for their planned commercial orbital spacecraft.
Not only will they launch from a former Air Force launch complex, they will be building their production facility there for assembling their reusable ships. Bezos also said that they hope to be flying by the end of the decade.
The yearlong manned mission on ISS is now halfway over.
If they complete their planned 341-day mission through March, Mark Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko will have logged the fifth and sixth longest human flights in space. They will not complete a full year in space, (as has been advertised by NASA), something that four Russians did in their Mir space station, including one flight of fourteen and a half months.
I had not realized that this mission was not actually a complete year until I read the story above. In reality, they are actually only spending just over eleven months in space. I find this very disappointing. The whole reason to have ISS is to do these long missions. To cut this short of a year seems silly. If anything, they should take advantage of the situation and try to push to break the longevity mission of 14.5 months.
Though this BBC news article is really nothing more than a propaganda piece for Virgin Galactic, the announcement it describes does confirm what has been suspected by space experts for months, that the company is reconfiguring LauncherOne to be more powerful and to launch on a bigger airplane, not WhiteKnightTwo.
In reading the quotes in this article from the various Virgin Galactic officials, I come away feeling even less confident of this company’s ability to get this rocket off the ground. To me, they sound like they are improvising wildly as they go, have no clear long term plan, and thus will have significant trouble settling on a final design early enough so that they will be able to build it intelligently.
I hope I am wrong. The report does suggest however that their investment in WhiteKnightTwo is increasingly appearing to be a waste. They won’t use it for LauncherOne, and their effort to launch SpaceShipTwo with it appears to be slowly vanishing.
The competition heats up: A Proton rocket today successfully launched a Russian communications satellite into orbit.
This was the second successful Proton launch since the May 16 launch failure. The next Proton launch is scheduled for October 9, part of a crowded scheduled for the rest of the year as the Russians attempt to launch a backlog of customer payloads.
Cool image time! Though the New Horizons science team will likely not issue their next press release until Friday, they appear to be posting new images on their website on a daily basis. From those images I pulled out the one below, which to fit I have cropped and reduced slightly in size. Be sure to go to the full image.
Do you see what I see? It appears that there are meandering braided dry streambeds on Pluto, draining into what appears to be a large basin.
Assuming my guess of what this is is correct, this is obviously not a streambed created by water. Earlier images showed nitrogen ice flows and glacier-like geology. It is possible this new image is observing evidence of past nitrogen riverbeds and nitrogen lakes.
Expect a very interesting press release from New Horizons later this week.
New observations of the best candidate galaxies now suggests that very advanced civilizations are very rare or don’t exist in the local universe.
They looked at several hundred nearby galaxies that emitted a high amount of mid-infrared radiation, which could possibly be produced as the waste heat from civilizations using energy on galactic scales.
Professor Michael Garrett (ASTRON & University of Leiden) has used radio measurements of the very best candidate galaxies and discovered that the vast majority of these systems present emission that is best explained by natural astrophysical processes. In particular, the galaxies as a sample, follow a well-known global relation that holds for almost all galaxies – the so-called “Mid-Infrared Radio correlation”. The presence of radio emission at the levels expected from the correlation, suggests that the mid-IR emission is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust – for example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formation.
As Professor Garrett explains: “the original research at Penn State has already told us that such systems are very rare but the new analysis suggests that this is probably an understatement, and that advanced Kardashev Type III civilisations basically don’t exist in the local Universe. In my view, it means we can all sleep safely in our beds tonight – an alien invasion doesn’t seem at all likely!”.
Joking aside, Professor Garrett is still looking at a few candidate galaxies that lie off of the astrophysical correlation: “Some of these systems definitely demand further investigation but those already studied in detail turn out to have a natural astrophysical explanation too. It’s very likely that the remaining systems also fall into this category but of course it’s worth checking just in case!”
Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
An evening pause: Hat tip Tom Biggar. As he wrote me, “We need a little sunshine.”
The Russians today arrested two more individuals for the embezzlement of funds during the construction work at the new spaceport in Vostochny.
The Lyublino district court of Moscow has ruled to take into custody director of the VIP Stroi Engineering company Vadim Mitryakov and former head of the Nizhny Novgorod Volga-Vyatka construction company (VVSK) Yevgenia Degtyareva, suspected of embezzling 300 million rubles ($4.42 million) allocated for the construction of roads to the Vostochny cosmodrome, the court said on Monday. “The court granted the investigation’s request on the measure of restraint for Mitryakov and Degtyareva — arrest for 2 months, i.e. until November 7,” the court’s press service told TASS.
This puts five now under arrest in the case.
