Want to guarantee that oil companies will stop drilling in the U.S., and therefore reduce the supply and raise the price? File lots of lawsuits!
More evidence has been uncovered showing that many journalists cared less about reporting the news during the 2008 Presidential campaign than helping Barak Obama get elected. Worse, these reporters were willing to smear their opponents in the worst possible manner, without evidence. Key quote:
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with [Reverend] Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
It appears the space war is heating up again. This analysis of the NASA authorization legislation issued by the House yesterday notes that it has serious differences with the Senate bill. The article notes that the House bill does not fund an additional shuttle mission while insisting that the government continue the construction of some variation of the Orion capsule and Ares rockets. See also this article from the Orlando Sentinel.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the climategate investigation of Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia allowed Jones himself to review and approve the evidence that the investigation would look at!
The U.S. Department of Energy has temporarily suspended all research funding to the University of East Anglia, pending its review of the climategate controversy.
It appears that the guy in the pink t-shirt attacking people in this video as they try to record events at a union rally is the Director of Collective Bargaining for the California Nurses Association! Gee, I wonder if he conducts all his negotiations this way?
This analysis of college admissions practices reveals that colleges discriminate badly against students from rural communities, merely because they are from those communities. Key quote:
Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.” [emphasis mine]
Amazing isn’t it? If you grow up in a rural American community in flyover country, do well as a teenager by participating responsibly as a leader in the kinds of after-school activities popular in rural communities, elite American colleges are going to hold that against you.
The article also describes bigotry against whites and asians (for racial reasons) as well as individuals with a military background. It is worthwhile reading the whole article.
The House Committee on Science and Technology has released the text [pdf] of its NASA reauthorization bill. The committee’s short thumbnail description of the language suggests it is similar to the Senate language. A quick scan of the text also suggests this as well. I hope to take a closer look at both the Senate and House bills later this week and then give my take on both.
An evening pause: Tomorrow will be the 41st anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. So, let’s start the week with a clip from the 1972 film version of Man of La Mancha to show why some impossible dreams are certainly possible. In this short scene, Peter O’Toole, as Cervantes, explains why he does not like to look at life, “as it is.”
The head of the Russian manned space program thinks that NASA’s new goals of building a rocket and capsule for reaching an asteroid by 2015 to be “unreal.”
This story is a few months old, but I think it is important enough to post again, now. Go and watch the two videos at this website. The first is a report by Contessa Brewer of MSNBC about a tea party rally where, according to Brewer, there were “white people showing up with guns.” The second video shows you an uncropped image of these same gun-toting “white people.” Then I dare you to tell me that any of the news reporting by Brewer and MSNBC is trustworthy, especially considering they have done nothing to correct her patently false story in the months since.
Boeing has released some new images and videos of its crew transportation vehicle, being built in partnership with Bigelow Aerospace using subsidies from NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.
John Glenn is meeting with President Obama today. Considering Glenn’s opposition to Obama’s plans for NASA, I suspect he is going to spend some his time lobbying Obama about changing those plans.
I just thought I should note quickly that my weekend cave trip was a spectacular success. John Harman, Pete Johnson, Nikki Fox, and myself surveyed almost 800 feet of beautiful and big virgin cave passage. I hope to have pictures soon.
Man, it is really fun to go where no one has ever gone before!
A headline that insists you read the story: Joe the Plumber (not that one) says he helped stop Gulf oil spill leak.
A preprint paper, published today on the astro-ph website but also accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, has confirmed what scientists have suspected about the dust and gas between the stars: As you travel closer to the center of the Milky Way galaxy this interstellar medium gets increasingly enriched with heavy elements. The scientists believe this is because the higher rate of supernovae in the inner galaxy sprays space with more of these atoms.
Since the field of extrasolar planets has also found that the more heavy elements a star contains, the more chance it will have planets, the new results above suggest that we will find more planets as we look inward towards the galactic center.
Brownshirt alert: Watch how these union participants at this union rally react to the fact that several citizens are videotaping the event:
Freedom of speech alert: Orders by government officials cause 73,000 blogs to be shut down.
A paper published on Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters by the American Geophysical Union attempts to calculate the total ice loss at the polar caps and how it will affect the sea level. Key quote from the abstract: “Rapid losses of Arctic sea ice and small Antarctic ice shelves are partially offset by thickening of Antarctic sea ice and large Antarctic ice shelves.”
NASA, scooped by this AP story, has now made it official. The first survey of the sky by the WISE infrared telescope has just been completed, finding 25,000 new asteroids, 95 of which are near Earth asteroids.
The test flights continue for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. On July 15 the two ships, flying as a unit, made their first flight with two crew members inside SpaceShipTwo.
An evening pause: Though Vera-Ellen made only a handful of films and is not that well known today, during the late 1940s and 1950s she was one of Hollywood’s top female dancers. Here she performs a delightful dance number from the film Call Me Madame (1953).
An Evening Pause: Let’s have some more music, this time something so deeply beautiful it makes the heart ache: Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli singing Time to Say Goodbye.
Posting today shall be very quiet, mostly because I am out in West Virginia, exploring a previously unknown upper level in a cave we are mapping. This passage was only discovered last month by Aaron Moses, John Harman, and Pete Johnson, who did a bolt climb of over 70 feet to reach a high lead in the wall of the cave. This weekend we will be pushing and mapping these virgin passages. Below is a picture taken by Brian Masney of Aaron Moses as he worked his way up the wall, with Pete Johnson providing a belay. More of Brian’s pictures can be seen on his Flicker webpage.
An evening pause: One of the best television science series ever produced was The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. Rather than simply describe science and knowledge, Bronowski instead pondered the nature of humanity. The best episode of the series was Knowledge or Certainty, in which Bronowski compared the humane uncertainty of science with the terrible consequences of dogma. As Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Want to know who invented the basic technology that made possible CD and DVD players possible? Take a look at this restrospective describing the discovery, from Physical Review Focus of the American Physcial Society.
It appears we are entering the dry season on Titan. Scientists have observed a 1 meter drop in the levels of Titan’s methane lakes over the last four years as the seasons on the moon go from summer to fall. Fun quote: “[The scientists] report that the shoreline of Ontario Lacus receded by about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from June 2005 to July 2009.”
An AP report today says that the infrared WISE space telescope has catalogued 25,000 new asteroids, 95 of which are near Earth objects. Actual data, however, has not yet been released.
Liberty of conscious update. Further news on that story of a college professor fired for teaching Catholic doctrines (on homosexuality) in a Catholic doctrines class.
O joy! It’s time to favor gender over achievement at NASA. The Obama administration is considering using governmental authority at NASA and other agencies to guarantee that the same number of women receive science, technology, engineering, and math degrees as men. The actual White House statement emphasizes the need “to ensure equity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education programs.” [emphasis mine].
If you want to be really annoyed, download NASA’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity documentation [pdf] and read how institutions are expected to do “periodic reviews of data broken down by gender. . . to ensure program policies and practices are not having a negative impact on program participation.” [page 5]
In other words, NASA should decide whether to provide education funds to universities, based not on the ability of those universities produce qualified engineers and scientists of any sex but on the number of women in their programs.
