July 7, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. John Batchelor was especially thrilled by the Curiosity image of the balanced rock.
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Year: 2016
Smallsat market to exceed $22 billion
The competition heats up: A new report estimates the market for small satellites will exceed $22 billion in the next decade.
According to Euroconsult’s latest report, Prospects for the Small Satellite Market, we are on the cusp of a major revolution for the space sector and overall space ecosystem, as more than 3,600 smallsats are expected to be launched over the next ten years, a significant increase from the previous decade. The total market value of these satellites is anticipated to be $22 billion (manufacture and launch), a 76% increase over that of 2006-2015. This rate of growth is unprecedented for the space sector and will bring about fundamental changes as both new and established industry players attempt to increase their capabilities in order to gain market share.
What I expect is a splitting of the space industry, with unmanned smallsats launched by smaller rockets on one hand and big spaceships and payloads launched by big rockets on the other hand. In both cases, the competition will likely force prices down, so that more customers will find space affordable.
Curious George celebrates Ramadan
The coming dark age: The children’s book series, Curious George, has just released a new book, in which the playful monkey celebrates Islam and its friendly holiday of Ramadan.
US author Hena Khan “wanted to focus on the celebratory aspects” of Ramadan, so George attends family gatherings and accompanies his friend Kareem to a mosque to put together charity baskets, she told AFP. …
Khan said the publisher granted her freedom to shape the project, and that she focused on making the holiday approachable. “It was really a reflection of the way Americans that I know celebrate and observe Ramadan, in a very simple way that’s understandable for children,” the mother of two said.
The book’s release coincides with a particular rise in anti-Islamic rhetoric, she noted. “There’s a very dangerous narrative being spread about Muslims and inaccurate things being said,” the author said. The book “comes at the right time in terms of trying to promote understanding and tolerance.”
Source: TheReligionofPeace.com
Gee, I wonder why there is a “rise in anti-Islamic rhetoric.” Could it be because of the more than two hundred attacks and more than 1,800 people killed during the just completed Ramadan holiday? Note also the hordes of murders (none) committed during this same time period by all other religions. What a shame we have this negative opinion of Islam.
I should add that my negative opinion of Islam was only reinforced by this bullying effort by an Islamic apologist to use a children’s book to make believe her religion has no track record of violence and hate. That she can’t deal with this issue, and wants to wish it away, makes me even more fearful and distrustful of anything any Islamic supporter says.
Boston Dynamics – Atlas, The Next Generation
An evening pause: The robots shown in this video are almost frighteningly good at what they do, which might be one of the many reasons Google is apparently trying to sell the company.
Hat tip Tim Vogel.
State Department reopens investigation into Clinton private server
The Obama State Department announced today that they are reopening their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and the mishandling of classified material by her and her aides.
Don’t be fooled by this. The only reason the State Department is announcing that they are reopening this investigation is to deflect criticism of the Obama administration before the election. Nothing will ever come of it, as long as the Democrats control the executive branch.
And there is no guarantee anything will come of it should Trump win, though the odds for a real investigation do increase.
Most of America’s elite universities do not require history majors to study U.S. history
The coming dark age: More than fifty American universities do not require history majors to take a course in United States history.
This bears repeating: The universities allow history majors to get a degree in history without having to study American history. The article also includes lots of interviews from lots of academic types, all making excuses for this dismal policy.
No wonder no one seems to know what the Bill of Rights is. Our universities, run almost exclusively by leftwing hacks, have sent it down the memory hole to be forgotten and ignored.
A planet with three suns
Astronomers, using instruments on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, have discovered an exoplanet that orbits around three suns.
Located about 340 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, HD 131399Ab is believed to be about 16 million years old, making it one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date, and one of very few directly imaged planets. With a temperature of 850 Kelvin (about 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit or 580 degrees Celsius) and weighing in at an estimated four Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly imaged exoplanets.
“HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that have been directly imaged, and it’s the first one in such an interesting dynamical configuration,” said Daniel Apai, an assistant professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences who leads a research group dedicated to finding and observing exoplanets at the UA.
“For about half of the planet’s orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky, the fainter two always much closer together, and changing in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year,” said Kevin Wagner, a first-year PhD student in Apai’s research group and the paper’s first author, who discovered HD 131399Ab. “For much of the planet’s year the stars appear close together, giving it a familiar night-side and day-side with a unique triple-sunset and sunrise each day. As the planet orbits and the stars grow further apart each day, they reach a point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of the other – at which point the planet is in near-constant daytime for about one-quarter of its orbit, or roughly 140 Earth-years.”
The orbit of the planet remains somewhat uncertain, and thus it might not be stable.
Obama illegally funding Obamacare, stonewalling Congress
The law is such an inconvenient thing: According to a new report, the Obama administration has been illegally funding Obamacare, and stonewalling Congress when it tries to exercise its constitutional required fiscal responsibility.
Among the report’s seemingly endless list of bad behavior by the Obama administration, it noted that multiple federal agencies withheld or redacted documents from Congress, “without any valid legal basis to do so.”
Hey, who cares about the law? That’s just some silly piece of paper that some old white guys wrote some 240 years ago. We are liberal, we are Democrats, and we know best. Now shut up and do as you are told!
VA performance worsens with more money
Government in action! A new report has found that the billions in increased funding given to the Veterans Administration to fix its problems apparently only made things worse.
The report, obtained by CNN but slated for public release Wednesday, highlights a variety of “deficiencies” that contribute to health care issues within the agency, including flawed governance, insufficient staffing, inadequate facilities, antiquated IT systems and inefficient use of employees. The commission also criticized changes that have been implemented since the scandal became known, including the VA’s Choice Program. The system was set up in 2014 to alleviate wait times by enabling veterans experiencing month-long delays or more to seek private care. The report states the program has only “aggravated wait times and frustrated veterans” due to confusing eligibility requirements and conflicting processes for coordinating with private health care providers.
As a solution, the commission recommends establishing a “VHA Care System,” which would function as a network of VA, Department of Defense and VA-approved private healthcare providers available to all enrolled veterans.
First, notice that the solution of this government report is a new layer of bureaucracy. That should fix things, eh? Second, note that the VA is really nothing more than what the left likes to call a “single-payer” system, whereby healthcare is entirely run by the federal government, which is the system the left still sees as the only solution to the failures of Obamacare. That should fix things too, eh?
Finally, the report demonstrates again that giving more money to a failed federal program will not fix it. The real solution is to kill the program entirely and start fresh.
House Freedom Caucus opposes Republican gun control measure
At least someone in Washington wants to defend the Bill of Rights: The House Freedom Caucus has announced that it would oppose the effort by the Republican leadership to pass a gun control law that would allow the federal government to deny citizens their second amendment rights.
The effort will probably kill the Republican proposal, which would have allowed the federal government to block a gun sale to someone on the no-fly list for three days, during which the Attorney General would to go to court to prove that the individual is a suspected terrorist.
Gee, what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t the Attorney General as well as the courts always enforce the law fairly and objectively? Who could imagine them teaming up to squelch a citizen’s rights, merely because that citizen might have opinions these federal officials don’t like?
FAA moves to regulate backyard drone use
The law is only there to crush the little people: The FAA has issued a subpoena against a father and son who posted youtube videos showing off their modifications to a drone, equipping it first with a gun and then with a flame thrower.
They are fighting the subpoena, noting that the FAA lacks any authority to regulate the use of recreational drones.
The Haughwouts’ attorney, Mario Cerame, told CBS News that the decision could potentially set an important precedent about the FAA’s power to regulate recreational drone use. Cerame added, the FAA should not be using airplane regulations to seek information about “a kid playing in his backyard…. They shouldn’t use airplane regulations,” Cerame told CBS News. “They should go get the authority from Congress. It’s about keeping the government in check as to what Congress said they can do.”
Hey, we know they never intended to do anything wrong! And besides, no reasonable prosecutor would ever consider bringing charges, right?
Balanced rock on Mars
Cool image time! Prior to going into safe mode Curiosity’s mast camera took a series of images of its surroundings, as is routine as the rover travels. Among those images was the image above, though I have cropped it and reduced its resolution to show here. It reveals a balanced rock on the horizon. It also shows, as do the other survey images, how increasingly rough the terrain is becoming that Curiosity is traveling through.
The Curiosity science team has no intention of getting too close to this rough terrain, but they do hope to get better views of this rock as they continue the rover’s journey uphill.