Year: 2017

Time/PBS video documentary nominated for Emmy despite factual error in title

9:25 am

Fake news: The Time/PBS video documentary A Year in Space has been nominated for an Emmy award, despite a blatant factual error in the show’s title.

I haven’t seen the documentary, and so it might a great achievement. Nonetheless, this mission only lasted 340 days, not a year, and to call it “a year in space” is not only false, but an outright lie. For a news organization to start out this wrong, in the title, and then for it to get an Emmy nomination, tells us a great deal about the standards of accuracy in television news.

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Breakthrough Starshot puts smallest satellites ever into orbit

9:18 am

Breakthrough Starshot, the privately funded $100 million effort to launch a probe to the nearest star, has put into orbit the world’s smallest satellites ever.

The six prototypes, dubbed Sprites, weigh only 4 grams and contain solar panels, computers, sensors, and radios on a surface equal to that of a U.S. postage stamp. Developed by researchers at Cornell University and transported into space as secondary payloads on a rocket built by the Europe-based company OHB System AG, the nanosatellites are being tested for electronics and communication performance in orbit.

The significance here is not so much that this advances the project’s interstellar mission, but that this technology is becoming more likely for use on both commercial and planetary spacecraft.

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Judge okays TMT permit

9:14 am

In a 305-page decision, an Hawaiian judge has approved a new construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea.

This does not mean that the project now proceeds.

This isn’t the final say on whether the embattled project will proceed.

Now that Amano has issued her 305-page proposed decision and order, the state land board will set a deadline for telescope opponents and permit applicants to file arguments against her recommendations. The board will later hold a hearing and then make the final decision on the project’s conservation district use permit.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic governor of Hawaii issued a short, non-committal statement, stating that he supports “the co-existence of astronomy and culture on Mauna Kea,” whatever that means.

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Denmark facing the first “summerless” July in four decades

10:14 pm

Does this mean anything? Denmark is facing the first July in four decades with no days warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature the weather bureau there defines as a summer day.

According to the Danish Meteorology Institute (DMI), July is likely to end without a single ‘summer day’, which is defined as any day in which temperatures top 25C (77F) at least somewhere in Denmark. If the next five days come and go without hitting 25C as predicted, it will mark the first time that Danes will have suffered through a summer-less July in nearly four decades.

“There are only three years in our records in which July contains a big fat zero when it comes to summer days and temps above 25C. That’s 1962, 1974 and 1979,” climatologist John Cappelen said on the DMI website. DMI’s database goes back to 1874.

Actually, this doesn’t mean a lot. It is however an interesting factoid that once again raises questions about the NASA and NOAA claims that this year (along with the past few years) were the hottest on record.

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Anti-vaccine campaigns are threatening the return of measles

8:09 pm

The coming dark age: The ignorant and mindless campaigns against vaccination is making it more likely that the U.S. will see a return of major measles epidemics.

Researchers Nathan Lo and Dr. Peter Hotez were motivated to conduct the study after seeing data showing growing vaccine hesitancy and use of non-medical exemptions—largely due to lies and misinformation about the safety of vaccines and the threat of devastating diseases, such as measles. Currently, about two percent of kids aged two to 11 have a non-medical vaccine exemption.

Measles, in particular, requires vigilant vaccination. The highly infectious virus can linger in the air for hours after a cough or sneeze. Those sickened develop high fevers, rashes, inflamed eyes, and cold-like stuffy nose and cough. But people can spread the infection days before those symptoms appear. About 30 percent develop complications, such as pneumonia, brain swelling, and blindness.

To thwart infections, a population must have between 90- and 95-percent vaccine coverage to maintain herd immunity. Many communities and counties in the US are already on the brink of dipping below that range and thereby losing their protection from a case of measles going, well, viral. And there’s room for those vaccination rates to continue to slip. Presently, 18 states allow for personal belief exemptions, and all but two states allow for religious or philosophical exemptions.

They of course propose forcing people to get their kids vaccinated. I say, if you have kids, you have the responsibility to get informed and get them vaccinated, instead of taking advice from uneducated television stars who know nothing about science and doctors who have had their licenses revoked.

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Commercial lunar mission gives launch contract to ULA

5:56 pm

Capitalism in space: Astrobotic, a private company planning to put a lander on the Moon by 2019, has awarded its launch contract to ULA.

This initial Peregrine lunar lander will fly 77 pounds (35 kilograms) of customer payloads from six nations either above or below the spacecraft’s deck, depending on specific needs. The autonomous landing will use cameras, guidance computing and five Aerojet Rocketdyne-made hypergolic engines to set the lander down on four shock-absorbing legs.

It will stand 6 feet tall (1.8 meters) and have a diameter of 8 feet (2.5 meters).Subsequent missions envision scaling up to payload masses of 585 pounds (265 kilograms). Markets range from scientific instruments to placing mementos on the Moon.

This company had been competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize, but pulled out of the competition when it realized it couldn’t launch by the end of 2018. It continued development, however, and apparently has gathered enough customers to pay for its launch in 2019.

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TDRS-M launch moved to August 20

5:47 pm

NASA has decided to delay the launch of its TDRS-M satellite until August 20.

This simplifies their launch schedule, as it allows SpaceX to launch as planned on August 12 and thus not interfere with an August 17 Russian spacewalk that is releasing two satellites from ISS. It will also give them plenty of time to replace the antenna that was damaged during launch prep, in an incident which they still have not described in any detail.

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Repeal of Obamacare fails in Senate

2:07 pm

Not surprisingly, a clean not-quite-full repeal of Obamacare failed today in the Senate, 45 to 54.

As expected, every Democrat voted to endorse their failed law. They were aided by seven fake Republicans who should all be challenged in primaries. These were Susan Collins of Maine, Dean Heller of Nevada, Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, John McCain of Arizona, and Rob Portman of Ohio.

A lot of pundits are going to claim that this failure to repeal is a betrayal of the Republican Party. I actually don’t see it as that. Had Mitch McConnell not allowed this vote I might have agreed, but he did allow it, thus forcing those from both parties who support Obamacare to go on record. We now know who those people are.

The real problem is that too many people in the U.S. no longer believe in freedom, instead want a government hand out, and have thus elected legislators (from both parties) who are only too happy to give it to them in exchange for power and wealth. If we are going to get rid of this bad law, as well as many other bad leftwing government policies, we need to vote these specific people out of office.

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Computer simulations prove that we can geoengineer the climate!

9:34 am

What could possibly go wrong? Global warming scientists have discovered, using computer simulations, that combining several different geoengineering techniques, what they call a “cocktail,” will save the planet and do no harm.

The team—which includes Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira, Long Cao and Lei Duan of Zhejiang University, and Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of Science—used models to simulate what would happen if sunlight were scattered by particles at the same time as the cirrus clouds were thinned. They wanted to understand how effective this combined set of tools would be at reversing climate change, both globally and regionally. “As far as I know, this is the first study to try to model using two different geoengineering approaches simultaneously to try to improve the overall fit of the technology,” Caldeira explained.

The good news is that their simulations showed that if both methods are deployed in concert, it would decrease warming to pre-industrial levels, as desired, and on a global level rainfall would also stay at pre-industrial levels. But the bad news is that while global average climate was largely restored, substantial differences remained locally, with some areas getting much wetter and other areas getting much drier.

And if you believe that this simulation captures what will really happen should global warming scientists dump vast amounts of light-reflecting particles in the upper atmosphere while also adding chemicals to thin cirrus clouds, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. We don’t even really know if the climate is warming as these political activists (they are not really scientists) claim. We don’t really understand how the climate actually works. We don’t even understand fully how the Sun really fluctuates, and it is without doubt the climate’s most important influence. And these guys claim they now know what will happen if we play god with the atmosphere? Give me a break.

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