Andreas Hellkvist – B3 Boogie
An evening pause: It appears this song “materialized” while Hellkvist was simply trying out this Hammond organ.
Hat tip Cotour.
Year: 2021
Dao Vallis: A giant river of ice on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on December 26, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an apparent glacial flow in a canyon heading downhill to the southwest, with evidence of a gully on its western wall whose collapse apparently squeezed into that glacial flow, pushing it to the east.
What makes this particular image interesting is not its uniqueness but just the opposite. Almost every high resolution picture along the length of this 750 mile long canyon, dubbed Dao Vallis, shows the same thing, an ice-filled ravine with that ice flowing like a river downhill.
The overview map below provides some spectacular context.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Student blackballed for saying “a man is a man, a woman is a woman”
They’re coming for you next: The “Education” department for one of New York’s state universities has suspended a student from its program because he had the nerve to simply say in public that “A man is a man, a woman is a woman. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man.”
“After review of all available materials, I find that, based on your continued public stance and social media presence, you do not consistently demonstrate behaviors required by the Conceptual Framework of the School of Education,” the Dean of the School of Education wrote in an email to Stevens.
The university claims that Stevens violated the school’s inclusivity doctrine, which requires teachers to foster “a diverse campus community marked by mutual respect for the unique talents and contributions of each individual.”
The Dean also insinuated that future teachers are required to support all aspects of homosexuality and gender identity. … The Dean told Stevens that his scientific stance on biology is “in conflict” with the state’s Dignity for All Students Act. “You continue to maintain, ‘I do not recognize the gender that they claim to be if they are not biologically that gender,’” the Dean said. “This public position is in conflict with the Dignity for All Students Act requiring teachers to maintain a classroom environment protecting the mental and emotional well-being of all students.”
In other words, no student in this university education program is allowed to publicly state some common basic facts about life, humanity, and biology. We must make believe we believe in falsehoods simply because others demand we do so. If what you say contradicts the beliefs of these bullies you must be blacklisted, blackballed, canceled, and destroyed.
Worse, can you imagine the incompetent educators that are going to come out of this program? Do you want these people teaching your children?
Not only has the student received threats of violence from others because of his stance, the university’s president, Denise Battles, also blasted him in a university-wide email. She claimed,
“There are clear legal limitations to what a public university can do in response to objectionable speech,” the president wrote. “As a result, there are few tools at our disposal to reduce the pain that such speech may cause.”
It is not there job to “reduce the pain” some speech might cause in others. That’s what freedom of speech is all about, protecting offensive speech so that society can absorb all sides of a debate.
Battles’ position also shows that she is taking sides. Her goal is entirely focused on protecting leftists and sexual deviants from hearing anything they might not agree with and which thus might offend their delicate self-images. She cares not at all about the pain inflicted on this student. He doesn’t rate a safe space ever.
Finally, Battles and the university have clearly decided to violate the legal limitations placed on them by the first amendment, despite what she claims. Their actions to punish this student for his legally-protected speech make them very vulnerable to a major lawsuit, one that they are likely to lose.
More important, why is anyone going to such a school? You not only won’t learn anything useful, you will be taught many things that are false and harmful.
NASA lunar rover experiences big budget overruns
NASA revealed yesterday that the budget for VIPER, a new NASA-built lunar rover, has increased from $250 million to $433.5 million.
The cost of the mission has gone up significantly. At the time NASA announced VIPER in October 2019, it projected a cost of about $250 million. As part of the confirmation review, known as Key Decision Point C, NASA set a formal cost commitment for the mission. NASA spokesperson Alison Hawkes said March 3 that the new lifecycle cost for the mission is $433.5 million.
NASA didn’t disclose the reason for the cost increase, but NASA officials said in June 2020 that they were postponing VIPER’s launch by about a year to late 2023 to change the rover’s design so it can meet the goal of operating for 100 days on the lunar surface. At the time, the agency declined to comment on VIPER’s cost.
This is very typical of modern NASA. Even though its planetary program produces some spectacular spacecraft and results, that program — like all NASA-built programs — rarely does so for the budget promised. For the planetary program, however, the overage for VIPER is startlingly high, especially in so short a time.
Be prepared for more delays and overages for this project, since that is usually what happens for NASA projects that experience such large budget increases.
China releases first Tianwen-1 images of rover landing site
The new colonial movement: China yesterday released the first two images taken by its Mars orbiter Tianwen-1 of its planned rover landing site in the northern lowland plains of Mars.
The image to the right is a mosaic of two wide angle photos from the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The white cross is the spot of the latitude and longitude that had previously been leaked to the Chinese press as the landing site. The white box shows the area covered by the only high resolution MRO photo, as of October 2020. Since then MRO has taken a number of additional high resolution images of this area.
The red boxes mark the areas covered by Tianwen-1’s two new images. Below is a reduced version of the larger of these two photos.
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SpaceX launches 60 more Starlink satellites
Capitalism in space: SpaceX last night successfully launched sixty more Starlink satellites, while also recovering the first stage during its eighth flight.
This is the second booster that has successfully completed eight flights. Its flight back to the drone ship appeared entirely routine, though SpaceX provided no footage of that return.
The 2021 launch race:
6 SpaceX
4 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Virgin Orbit
1 Northrop Grumman
1 India
The U.S. now leads China 9 to 4 in the national rankings.
March 3, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Bell Telephone: Explaining mobile phone technology, c1946
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who notes that he watched this video on his modern mobile phone.
What strikes me is how much we take this capability for granted, especially when you watch and see how “compact” the car units were. Yet, in the 1940s when this technology was first being developed the use of telephones themselves was only a few decades old. The very idea of being able to communicate instantly with anyone over long distances was still relatively new. Now it included talking to people at random locations. For the people of that time, this was exciting news harboring a bright future.
The Starship has landed!
After the flight.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed the first test flight of Starship prototype #10, not only completing the launch and descent manuevers but also successfully landing the prototype vertically on the landing pad.
The flight was similar to the previous two in that the spacecraft rose very slowly, hovered at about 6 miles, and then did a flip to place itself horizontal for its descent. Then as it approached the ground it righted itself as it fired up three engines (to make sure at least one worked), and then shut down two so that one engine brought the spacecraft down smoothly.
Next comes prototype #11. Its flight should occur with only a matter of weeks.
Starship #10 on its way down after exploding.
UPDATE: A few minutes after landing the prototype exploded, flinging itself off the launchpad. No word yet on why this happened, but I wonder if maybe this was a planned self-destruction. They don’t plan to fly this bird again, and it takes up a lot of storage space. Blowing it up saves space, though it does destroy material that could be salvaged for other uses.
To the right is a screen capture from one of LabPadre’s live streams, shortly after the ship launched itself from the pad and was on its way down. It only went up about two hundred feet.
If this wasn’t planned, SpaceX needs to figure out why this happened. Either way, we shall certainly find out in the coming days.
Below is SpaceX’s video of the entire flight. Enjoy!
Today’s blacklisted American: Non-profit blackballs student for daring to defend free speech
They’re coming for you next: A Florida environmental non-profit canceled a student’s community service event because she had dared to write an article defending free speech and her decision to vote against the impeachment of a student senator simply because he had asked a valid question about a proposed bill allocating funds to a black student organization..
The student, Karoline Tyrrel, is also a student senator at Florida Gulf Coast University. Apparently she was one of only two senators to vote against impeaching that other senator for asking his question. As she wrote in her article,
“During the discussion, a respected senator stood up and asked a question. He’s known for asking tasking questions, which I greatly appreciate, as we are supposed to question bills, appointments, and more. The senator expressed his concerns of the bill description. He found terms such as “black excellence” to imply black superiority, and suggested a possible rephrasing of this one line, saying he believes that all races should be treated and held to the same level of excellence,” she summarized.
…The following week had talks of impeachment and removing him from his role because of his “racist” and “disgusting” comments,” Tyrrel added.
As a result, the student senator was one of two people who voted against impeaching the individual who asked the question, noting “many senators who I know ethically sided with the senator expressed their feelings to me, but when it came time to vote, all but one other person and myself voted to save their image.” [emphasis mine]
The non-profit then wrote her to cancel her volunteer event, stating that her article and vote “provoked diverseness.” The non-profit’s statement was intellectually dishonest to the extreme, in that in one sentence they claim they support diversity and inclusion, even as they in the very next sentence reject diversity and inclusion by blackballing her.
Meanwhile, the highlighted words in the quote above illustrate the main problem. I suspect a majority of the students were horrified by this call for impeachment, but most were too cowardly to stand up to the bullies and vote against it. Instead, they bowed their heads and violated their personal ethics so as to avoid causing trouble for themselves.
This cowardice is probably the biggest reason the blacklisting attempts by the left across America are working. People are afraid, and are also too timid to stand up to fight back.
As Burke said, “For evil to triumph good men need only do nothing.” Tragically we’ve got a lot of nothing going on right now. And its going to lead to a lot more evil.
Starship #10 aborts at launch
Today’s first attempt by SpaceX to complete a 6-mile flight of its tenth Starship prototype ended when the rocket’s computers shut the engines down at T-0, just after they had ignited.
At this time they are assessing the situation to see if they have time to try again today. The SpaceX live feed is there still active, and viewable in my previous post today.
UPDATE: They will try again in about two hours.
Mining country on Mars?
Today’s cool image might very well be giving us a glimpse of one of the most promising regions on Mars for future mining. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced, is made up of two context camera images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), found here and here. I chose to begin with this wider context camera mosaic because this is one of the rare times the context camera is more exciting an image than the close-up high resolution photo.
This photo covers the southern end of the one of the two curved fissures dubbed Nili Fossae and are thought to be left over evidence of the giant impact that created Isidis Basin to the southeast. These two fissures are about 300 miles long, and can be as much as 1,600 feet deep in places. At this southern end, we can see what look like at least two different drainage channels feeding into the fissure.
The overview map below provides the context of this location on Mars, including its relationship to Jezero Crater where Perseverance now sits.
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