An evening pause: This 1950s song, which many think is titled “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” actually has no connection to the 1950s book with that title. As noted at the youtube webpage, “Maybe Hubert Selby, the book’s author objected or Gene didn’t want to confuse people since they are unconnected.” Thus, the different title.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
The competition heats up? NASA has awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a $1.4 billion contract to restart production on the space shuttle engines, with the intent to use those engines for its hoped-for missions beyond Earth orbit using the Space Launch System (SLS).
Normally I am thrilled when an American company gets a contract to build rocket engines, but here I have my doubts. This contract will only produce deep space engines if Congress gives NASA the money to fly SLS on deep space missions. Right now, Congress has only given NASA just enough money to fly one, maybe two SLS missions, with the second not coming until 2024 at the earliest. My impression of this contract award thus is that it is not to produce engines, but to keep Aerojet Rocketdyne from going bust, since no one else has been interested recently in buying their engines. In other words, it is pork, government money handed out in order to keep the people who work for Aerojet employed.
This is not the way to become a space-faring society. Better Aerojet Rocketdyne goes bust and the good engineers that work for it find jobs with companies making products that people want. Then, the government money can be spent wisely on things that we will eventually want and use, instead of make-work projects that accomplish nothing.
The coming dark age: Graduate students at Kansas University are demanding the firing of a professor for trying to talk to them reasonably about race issues and saying things they didn’t agree with.
The article describes in detail the circumstances that caused the students, which in a sane world would have been considered actions of a decent and thoughtful professor trying to inspire a thoughtful discussion about issues of our time. The students, which the article’s names and correctly dubs “little fascists”, instead turn around and smear the professor to order to get her fired.
However, the worst aspect of this story is something noted by another professor in an email to the author of the article:
As a fellow communication professor on the tenure track, what’s happening at KU [Kansas University] chills me about the future of my profession. As an evangelical with “crunchy con” political leanings, I’ve always had to be mindful of what supervisors or colleagues might do should I make me views too strongly known (though thankfully not at my current institution, in which I feel very welcomed!). But my concern increasingly is not with the higher-ups, but with the possibility of unintentionally saying (or failing to display proper outrage at) something that the wrong student deems triggering, insensitive, discriminatory, or “unsafe.”
What is particularly disheartening is that the students in this scenario are not just run-of-the-mill undergrads looking for a cause of the week. They are grad students in one of the top programs in my discipline. Some of them are going to be newly-minted professors within the next six years or less. I agree with Jonathan Haidt that something has shifted in the last two or three years in terms of the grievance culture among today’s students, and we are only just beginning to see the consequences in places like Mizzou, Yale, and now, KU. Currently, much of the ire is being directed by students against their professors, but what happens when these students *become* the professors?
A new dark age will certainly come if we allow these thugs to gain power over others. Every student who is named here should themselves be expelled from the university. Not only do they not have the slightest idea what a university education is supposed to teach them, allowing them to gain a degree with allow them to impose their ignorance and fascist beliefs onto others.
The competition heats up: NASA has awarded three different companies contracts to develop advanced ion and nuclear propulsion systems for future interplanetary missions, both manned and unmanned.
These are development contacts, all below $10 million. However, they all appeared structured like NASA’s cargo and crew contracts for ISS, where the contractor does all of the development and design, with NASA only supplying some support and periodic payments when the contractor achieves agreed-upon milestones. Because of this, the contractors will own the engines their develop, and will be able to sell them to other customers after development, thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
An evening pause: I prefer to do it a bit slower, but this will give the couch potatoes here a sense of why I and others like to go hiking.
Hat tip Danae.
The Dawn science team have released their first images of the north and south poles of Ceres.
The region around the south pole appears black in this view because this area has been in shade ever since Dawn’s arrival on March 6, 2015, and is therefore not visible. At the north polar region, craters Jarovit, Ghanan and Asari are visible, as well as the mountain Ysolo Mons. Near the south pole, craters Attis and Zadeni can be seen.
While Donald Trump has remained the leader in every poll for president since he entered the campaign, it still remains to be seen whether Republican voters will give him the nod when actual voting begins in the primaries. I have tended to believe that they will not, and I base this on Trump’s essential lack of understanding of the small government principles of conservatism. Though it is very clear that Trump has rejected the left and the big government ideas of the Democratic Party, it is also clear that he really doesn’t really believe in small government either. This story quoting a Trump speech from yesterday illustrates this very well:
Speaking during a town hall meeting in Iowa Thursday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump told the crowd the way to make college affordable for students is “to start some governmental program. … Well the only way you can do it is you have to start some governmental program and you have governmental programs right now,” Trump told the crowd.
Click on the link to read the whole quote, which also illustrates the generally incoherent way in which Trump speaks. His incoherency however, is not what hurts him here, but his easy acceptance of the idea that government is the solution.
Don’t get me wrong. Trump is by far a better candidate than any of the Democratic Party options, and he would do a far better job then them as well. His business experience in the real world will make him a better president, and is also likely the reason he now generally favors conservative solutions. Nonetheless, when voting time comes I think the Republican voters are going to move away from him.
Finding out what’s in it: The cost to meet Obamacare regulations requiring beer companies to include specific calorie information on every beer they make is likely going to destroy many small local beer breweries.
As of December 2016, all brewers must include a detailed calorie count on every type of beer they produce. Failure to comply with the new regulations means craft brewers will not be able to sell their beer in any restaurant chain with over 20 locations. Because this is a major market for selling beer, it hamstrings smaller craft brewers if they do not comply.
The Cato Institute estimates the Obamacare calorie labeling requirements will cost a business as much as $77,000 to implement. For larger beer companies, this is a drop in the bucket, but for small, local craft brewers it represents a significant cost that they must pay. As a result, it creates a significant disadvantage compared to larger beer companies who can better absorb the cost of this new regulation.
But hey, who cares if a major thriving industry should be destroyed by Obamacare. The Democrats passed it because they care. And caring is all that matters, no matter what the consequences.
The competition heats up: A California company, Hera Systems, has announced plans to launch 9 cubesats late in 2016 to provide commercial imagery of the Earth.
Hera Systems of San Jose, California, is planning to launch nine cubesat-class spacecraft in late 2016 that will be able to provide images at resolutions of up to one meter over several spectral bands, as well as video. That initial constellation could grow in time to up to 48 satellites, allowing the company to take images of the same location several times a day.
This field is becoming very crowded. Either there will be a significant shake-out, or we will see a burst of profits that will invigorate it even more. The companies all seem to think there is enough business to justify their existence.
Jeff Bezos today personally delivered to the Seattle Musuem of Flight the restored remains of two Apollo Saturn V engines that his company recovered from the ocean floor in 2013.
Over the course of two and a half years, the experts at the museum worked to stabilize the F-1 engine parts, halting the corrosion caused by the salt water. The engines were not restored, however. Rather they were conserved in their “as found” condition to preserve their full history, from the sky to the sea.
In the process, the Cosmosphere was able to reveal and research the parts’ serial numbers and identify the flight history for most of the large parts. The conservators were able to tie the components to the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions in 1969 and to Apollo 16 in 1972.
The Apollo 11 components will be donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The competition heats up: ULA has announced that they are adding a cubesat launch capability to their Atlas 5 rocket so that by 2017 they will be able to place in orbit as many as 24 cubesats per launch, as secondary payloads.
In addition, the company will offer universities to compete for six launch slots at no charge.
“ULA will offer universities the chance to compete for at least six CubeSat launch slots on two Atlas V missions, with a goal to eventually add university CubeSat slots to nearly every Atlas and Vulcan launch,” noted Tory Bruno, ULA president and CEO. “There is a growing need for universities to have access and availability to launch their CubeSats and this program will transform the way these universities get to space by making space more affordable and accessible.”
This offer is ULA’s way of trying to capture some of that growing smallsat market that companies like Rocket Labs and Virgin Galactic are trying to grab.
An evening pause: Performed live December 19, 2010.
Hat tip Danae.
Miners in Botswana have uncovered the largest single diamond discovered since 1905, more than 1,100 carets.
It is also the second largest diamond ever found.
With the possibility of a new confrontation on Mauna Kea between protesters and the builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), Hawaii’s Supreme Court on Tuesday placed a temporary stay on all work until December 2..
Earlier in the week, Thirty Meter Telescope opponents were preparing to face off Wednesday against hundreds of law enforcement officers. But hours before the anticipated showdown, state Department of Land and Natural Resources agents who were scheduled to be on Mauna Kea to ensure TMT crews safe, unobstructed access to the construction site were told to stand down after the state Supreme Court temporarily prevented construction on the mountain until December 2.
TMT officials say they wanted for workers to complete maintenance and repairs on equipment that has sat idle since April, when construction crews were blocked by more than 750 protesters. Opponents of the project say it desecrates a sacred Native Hawaiian place.
At least two heavy-duty machines at the construction are reportedly leaking oil and fuel.
As much as these protesters claim they do not want the mountain desecrated, I believe their real goal, much like the thugs today on college campuses, is the gaining of power. The religious argument is merely a convenient tool for hiding their power grab. And even if they are sincere, their ultimate goal is still racist, as they are hostile to all non-Hawaiian natives, and wish them expunged from the islands.
Under these conditions, I do not see TMT being built on Mauna Kea. Even though the public there generally supports its construction, the public also has a naive sympathy for the protesters (Scroll down in this article to see the poll numbers).
A Japanese Venus research spacecraft, dubbed Akatsuki, has completed all its preliminary course corrections and is ready for a December 7 orbital insertion attempt, the second since the spacecraft’s main engine failed during the first attempt in 2010.
The space probe accomplished its last targeting maneuver Oct. 11 to aim for its Dec. 7 arrival at Venus, and all systems are go for the encounter, said Takeshi Imamura, Akatsuki’s project scientist at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. Imamura said the Akatsuki spacecraft, named for the Japanese word for dawn, will zoom 541 kilometers, or 336 miles, above Venus for a 20-minute insertion burn using the probe’s secondary attitude control thrusters. Japanese ground controllers have programmed the probe to use the backup rocket jets after a faulty valve knocked out Akatsuki’s main engine during its first attempt to enter orbit around Venus in December 2010.
Four of the eight attitude control thrusters aboard Akatsuki will fire for 20 minutes and 33 seconds to slow the spacecraft down enough for Venus’ gravity to pull it into an egg-shaped orbit that skims above the planet’s cloud tops on the low end and ranges several hundred thousand miles in altitude at peak altitude. The reaction control thrusters, originally designed to help point the spacecraft, were not rated for such a hefty propulsive maneuver.
To make this second chance possible, they have spent the last five years improvising. First they dumped the fuel from the now-useless main engine to make the spacecraft lighter so that the attitude control thrusters could handle the maneuvers. Then they used those thrusters repeatedly to adjust the course to bring Akatsuki back to Venus after it zipped past in 2010.
If they succeed in getting it in a useful orbit on December 7, it will be real triumph for these Japanese engineers.
Astronomers have captured the first image, using ground-based telescopes, of an exoplanet in the process of forming.
The star is 450 light years away, and the image is really a combined image using data taken by two different telescopes, one in infrared light and the other gathering visible light spectroscopy. So, this really isn’t a photograph like you’d take with your camera, but a re-creation. Nonetheless it provides us a first look at the star and the new planet forming in orbit around it.
An evening pause: Making wine, the modern way. It is interesting how many steps here are still done by hand when they clearly could be automated. I suspect that it doesn’t pay for this winery to upgrade to more sophisticated equipment because their overall output is relatively small and it is more efficient for these steps to still be done by hand.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann, who tells me he is thinking of planting his own grape vines this year.
Link here.
The writer outlines the history of English and how the many different languages that contributed to it caused it to be so different from most other languages. Some of the oddities he notes are quite fascinating because we English-speakers take them so much for granted. He only hints, however, at what is probably the English language’s greatest gift — its gigantic vocabulary resulting from its remarkable ability to absorb new words — which probably comes from that same polyglot history.
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
Faced with rising violence from Islamic and Palestinian terrorists, Israel this month has eased its gun control rules so that more citizens can own and use guns.
Under the new policy, all IDF officers above the rank of 2nd lieutenant and non-commissioned officers from the rank of first sergeant and up can obtain a permit, even if they hold those ranks in the reserves. Parallel ranks in the police and other security services have been given the same access.
This doesn’t help those who came to the country later in life and never served in the military, but it is still a step in the right direction. The Palestinians wish to live by the sword. They then face the increasing possibility that they will die by it.
