The competition heats up: India has successfully completed a full duration static hot fire test of the cryogenic engine it is developing for its more powerful GSLV rocket.
The press release is very short and lacking in many details, including any detailed information about the engine being tested. However, this success bodes well for India’s plans to launch a new upgraded GSLV before the end of the year.
The uncertainty of science: An analysis of scientific surveys suggests that one in five may contain fake data.
With few exceptions, they limited their analysis to studies that asked more than 1000 people at least 75 questions on a range of topics. And to be conservative, they forgave studies for which at least 95% of the data passed the test.
That made the results all the more worrying: Among 1008 surveys, their test flagged 17% as likely to contain a significant portion of fabricated data. For surveys conducted in wealthy westernized nations, that figure drops to 5%, whereas for those done in the developing world it shoots up to 26%.
To me the difference found between first and third world countries makes the results more believable. It suggests that survey companies who do these surveys have a problem that should be addressed. Instead, the research
is being hotly disputed by the Pew Research Center, one of the major funders of such surveys. And the organization has gone so far as to request the researchers desist from publishing their work.
Pew reviewed the questionable surveys and found evidence that the analysis produced some false positives. They used this as reason to reject its results entirely. That the analysis has also been successful in detecting fraud in several surveys apparently does not concern them.
In 1989 Boris Yeltsin, member of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and leader of one of what could be considered the equivalent of one of its mid-western states, visited Texas and toured the Johnson Space Center as well as a typical American supermarket. It was the grocery store that impressed him, not America’s space program.
He was dazzled by the fact that grocery stores were everywhere, and that they even offered free samples. A year or so later, a biographer wrote that on the plane ride from Texas to Florida, Yelstin couldn’t get the vision of the endless food supply out of his mind, and lamented how different things were for his own countrymen. According to wikipedia, Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’”
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.”
And then, in his own autobiography, Yeltsin wrote about the experience at the grocery store himself, which reshaped his entire view on communism, ultimately leading to his leaving the Communist party. “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
In writing Leaving Earth, I read all these same sources and was struck as well by how much this moment influenced Yeltsin. Very clearly, what Yeltsin saw that day led him to abandon communism.
If only more Americans could experience the same contrast he did, that of the shortages and poverty of top-down, command economies like socialism and communism vs the wealth and vibrancy and freedom of capitalism. I suspect unfortunately they will have to turn the U.S. into a new Soviet Union before they will realize how bankrupt such systems are.
Finding out what’s in it: A GAO report has found that the Obamacare bureaucracy gave out millions of dollars in subsidies to more than 35,000 applicants who did not qualify.
Worse, the GAO decided to test the system directly, and created twelve fake applicants whose applications had problems that should have prevented them from receiving subsidies The result?
It was able to secure $2,500 a month subsidies for 11 of those applicants. When CMS [the bureaucracy administering Obamacare] asked for documents to resolve inconsistencies in the files, GAO either sent fake documents or simply didn’t send anything. In both cases, CMS sent letters acknowledging receipt of documents and stating the matter had been resolved. Again, this was the case even when GAO had sent nothing in response to the initial CMS query. In the end, GAO was able to keep all 11 fictitious applicants on subsidies throughout 2014, each one directing about $30,000 in federal funds to an insurer under false pretenses. And it’s worth noting that, later on in the report, GAO makes clear it created this fake applicants with no prior or inside knowledge of any verification procedures that might be applied. This was something that anyone could have done.
There’s more at the link, such as the fact that the bureaucracy also decided, quite arbitrarily, to send subsidies to applicants who claimed they were not in prison, even if those applicants were on the official database of individuals in prison (and thus not qualified for subsidies according to the law).
But hey, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and even Donald Trump want to use the government to administer health care. Trump might say he wants to get rid of Obamacare, but he also wants the government to run the system he will create to replace it. What could possibly go wrong?
After a week of testing scientists have now completely released LISA Pathfinder’s two gold-platinum cubes so that they are floating free within the spacecraft.
With the cubes released, the spacecraft is now measuring the position of each cube and using thrusters to adjust its position and keep the cubes floating within it. This success has essentially proven that the technology works, though they now have to see if the technology can be maintained in orbit for a long enough period of time to be worthwhile. If so, this mission will be followed by multiple similar spacecraft, flying in formation while also measuring their positions precisely relative to each other. If a gravitational wave rolls past, they will detect it by the tiny differences of each cube’s position, kind of like beach balls floating on the ocean as a wave rolls past.
An evening pause: I’ve posted the original version by Elvis Presley from the movie Blue Hawaii (1961) back in 2013, but this live version,live at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on January 8, 2016, is definitely worth seeing. She dedicated the song to her fiancé, Adam Weaver, and during the performance it is obvious that she is singing directly to him in the audience.
I also dare you to watch it without singing along.
Hat tip Edward Thelen from reminding me that this song needs a revisit.
Cool image time! As Dawn continues its survey of Ceres the science team is beginning to release images looking sideways at the planet, rather than straight down, in order to get a better understanding of the topography. The image to the right is an example. It shows the area around 37-mile-wide Fluusa Crater. I have cropped it to emphasize the most rugged areas, especially the jagged cliff meandering away towards the horizon.
This image provides a hint at the differences between Ceres and the Moon. Up until now Dawn images have given the impression that Ceres is very much like the heavily cratered lunar surface. The terrain in this image however suggests to me that Ceres’ surface crust is much less dense because of the low gravity, and thus has a light puffy feel to it. The Moon’s surface is rarely this uneven, as its higher gravity has pounded things down, smoothing them out somewhat.
SpaceX today scrubbed its Falcon 9 launch of a commercial communications satellite about a half hour before launch time.
They have not revealed why they cancelled, though they report the rocket is in good condition and have rescheduled for the same 6:46 pm (Eastern) launch tomorrow.
Update: It appears they had not gotten the rocket’s liquid oxygen as cold as they want. The colder it is, the denser it is, and the more fuel they can pack into the tank.
Does this make you feel safer? Homeland Security has lost 165 firearms and more than 1,300 security badges in the past three years.
The people running Homeland Security are generally the same people who want to prevent ordinary citizens from possessing guns. I would say instead that we all would be safer if we owned the guns and they were banned at Homeland Security.
Fascists: A new review of free speech on campuses across the United States has listed the country’s ten most oppressive colleges, with examples of why they earned this odious status.
The first link is the actual report, while the second provides a good quick summary. In either case, the behavior of college officials in attempting to squelch dissent is quite disgusting. Far more horrifying and worrisome for the future were the number of cases where the students themselves moved to stamp down on opposing views. They are the future, and that future does not look pleasant.
Some good news: In South Carolina students are suing their college for interrogating them for daring to hold an event in support of free speech that offended some students.
The Rosetta science team has released their first rough map of the geological regions of Comet 67P/C-G’s southern hemisphere, in darkness up until recently.
As Rosetta moves closer to the comet in the coming months, they will gather high resolution images of the south and compile them to produce a final map.
The podcast of my appearance tonight on the John Batchelor Show is below the fold. Some of the topics: Falcon 9 static test, Starliner drop test, SpaceShipTwo SUV tow from a hanger. Which do you think is the least exciting?
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