Capitalism in space: The argon-fueled plasma rocket engine being developed by the Ad Astra Rocket Company has advanced its test engine firings from 30 seconds long to five minutes long.
Their $9 million contract with NASA calls for a 100-hour-long engine firing by 2018. At the moment the company says they are on schedule to meet that goal.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed its routine dress rehearsal static fire in preparation for a Monday launch of a Dragon cargo capsule to ISS.
Two items of note regarding this launch. First, it will be the last cargo capsule launched by SpaceX that has not been used before. From now on they plan on recycling all cargo ships, and have actually shut down the production line building new cargo capsules. Instead, they want to focus on building new upgraded manned Dragon capsules.
Second, even as this launch goes forward, with the first stage expected to land at Kennedy on their landing pad there, they are building the second landing pad at this same site to accommodate the planned November first launch of Falcon Heavy. For that launch, the two side mounted first stages will return to Kennedy, while the core stage will land on a barge in the ocean.
Link here. Considering the increasingly fascist attitude of Google towards its employees and its users, I thought it worthwhile to provide this list of alternatives. I use Startpage, which isn’t listed because it is actually a slightly different version of Ixquick.
There is no reason to blindly and mindlessly depend on Google. There are many choices out there. Use your freedom and choose. It is our own personal responsibility to do so.
Bigoted intelligentsia: A Minnesota writing conference was cancelled yesterday because people complained the line-up of speakers did not have enough minorities.
Twenty-two authors were set to speak at the event, but only one had an ethnic background. William Alexander, winner of a National Book Award, is a Cuban-American author. Udesen said the event was canceled in part because of the lack of diversity in the line-up, but also because not enough people were going to attend.
[Britt Udesen, executive director of the event] added that they invited more than 30 people of color to speak at the conference, but none accepted the invitation.
So, now it is unacceptable to even hold an event if minorities are not interested in participated. They must be there, since whites don’t count.
Utter and blatant bigotry. That’s all this is.
Using two Juno images of the same area, taken at slightly different times, scientists have produced what might be the first very short gif animation showing the changing circulation patterns in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
The animation is only two images long, so in a sense it isn’t a movie but a blink comparison. Moreover, the difference in circulation patterns between the two images is not strongly evident, partly because the two images have different resolution and somewhat different lighting. Nonetheless, this animation foretells what will should become possible with time, as Juno’s mission continues. Eventually its images will show the changes in the gas giant’s storms.
Cassini is about to begin its last of five orbits of Saturn, before it is sent into the planet’s atmosphere to burn up.
Cassini will make the first of these five passes over Saturn at 12:22 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 14. The spacecraft’s point of closest approach to Saturn during these passes will be between about 1,010 and 1,060 miles (1,630 and 1,710 kilometers) above Saturn’s cloud tops.
The spacecraft is expected to encounter atmosphere dense enough to require the use of its small rocket thrusters to maintain stability – conditions similar to those encountered during many of Cassini’s close flybys of Saturn’s moon Titan, which has its own dense atmosphere. “Cassini’s Titan flybys prepared us for these rapid passes through Saturn’s upper atmosphere,” said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “Thanks to our past experience, the team is confident that we understand how the spacecraft will behave at the atmospheric densities our models predict.”
An evening pause: Recorded live in 1978.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Bigoted academia: For the second year in a row Brandeis University is offering a racist $10K journalism grant only to minorities and women, specifically excluding white males.
The grant’s entire eligibility requirements, from the university’s press release, are quite blunt:
Applications from women and journalists of color working in any type of media — print, audio, video, online — will be considered.
Applicants must be U.S. citizens but can be reporting from abroad.
As the article above notes, federal law forbids any organization that receives federal funds (as Brandeis does) from discriminating based on either sex or race. But then, bigotry today in the leftwing community is perfectly all right, as long as you are oppressing whites or men.
I think Lous Brandeis, for whom this university is named, would be horrified by its actions.
Michelle Malkin has raised an interesting question regarding the three Pakistani brothers who ran the Democrats computer infrastructure in Congress for the past thirteen years and are now charged with bank fraud and are suspected of doing much worse: How did they get in the country in the first place?
Were the Awans and their family and friends H-1B tech workers — like so many of the 650,000 “temporary” foreign guest workers imported into America under that program over the past quarter-century and predominantly working in IT?
And if they’re not H-1Bs, how exactly did Awan and company get here, when did they get here, and who brought them over here and why?
…Awan first landed a job with former Democrat Rep. Robert Wexler as an “information technology director” in 2004 at the ripe age of 24 or 25. His younger brother, Jamal, is reportedly only 23 years old, yet has pulled in a salary of nearly $160,000 a year since 2014 (when he was 20!) as an information technology worker for Democrat Rep. Julia Brownley. That’s 3.1 times greater than the median salary for a House IT worker, according to InsideGov.
Who sponsored these young foreign techies and chose them to do work in our nation’s capital doing a job that countless young Americans are qualified to do? If not H-1B, did they arrive first as students on foreign visas (who are supposed to return home after their course of study), then game the system to work through the cheap-labor loopholes, such as the Optional Practical Training program? Or did they switch visa categories? Did they pull strings through their well-connected Democratic employers?
Not surprisingly, she has been unable to get an answer to this question from any of the many Democrats who had hired these Pakistanis. You would almost think the Democrats are stonewalling the investigation. It would also be reasonable for you to think the Democrats seem more interested in protecting non-Americans, coming from a Muslim country with many ties to radical Islamic terrorists, then in defending the security of the United States.
Link here. The essay contains a nice collection of links documenting Google’s increasing leftwing fascist bent. The key quote however is this:
Damore [the man Google fired] was working on Google’s search infrastructure. And there’s little doubt that he was wasted there. Google’s search has grown more useless even as the company’s search revenues have grown. Google’s goal is to streamline and shape search results for a mobile environment by giving users what it thinks they want rather than what they are actually searching for. Google isn’t just politically left-wing, its product mindset has become all about forcing users to do what it thinks they should be doing. [emphasis mine]
In other words, Google’s approach to providing a search engine is now aimed at shaping all searches to go where they want them to.
If you use Google, it is time to find another search engine.
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A evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
