Author: Robert Zimmerman

Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.

6:08 pm

Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.

People started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013 through Mars One, a Netherlands-based private venture that wants to land humans there by 2025. By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than 200,000 people had submitted one. Today, Mars One announced that it’s made a short(er) list of 1,058 applicants.

These are individuals willing to make a one way trip.

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Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded, and closing in on an all time record.

10:50 am

The uncertainty of science: Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded and is closing in on an all time record.

The link is also amusing in that it includes some interesting predictions made by global warming scientists and politicians in recent years, all predicting that the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by 2013.

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Moronic Common Core lessons the federal government is imposing on public schools.

9:35 am

Government marches on! Moronic Common Core lessons the federal government is imposing on public schools.

#4 is especially vile, as its whole point is to encourage racial hatred.

I have not written much about the federally mandated education program Common Core, but don’t worry, nothing about it will surprise you. It is like most things the federal government requires these days, poorly thought out, politically motivated, and destructive to our society.

Other than that, it is peachy cream wonderful!

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Dave Barry looks back at 2013.

9:18 am

Dave Barry looks back at 2013: The year of the zombies.

But getting back to the zombies: It wasn’t just people who came back alarmingly in 2013. The Cold War with Russia came back. Al-Qaeda came back. Turmoil in the Middle East came back. The debt ceiling came back. The major league baseball drug scandal came back. Dennis Rodman came back and went on humanitarian missions to North Korea (or maybe we just hallucinated that). The Endlessly Looming Government Shutdown came back. People lining up to buy iPhones to replace iPhones that they bought only minutes earlier came back. And for approximately the 250th time, the Obama administration pivoted back to the economy, which has somehow been recovering for years now without actually getting any better. Unfortunately, before they could get the darned thing fixed, the administration had to pivot back to yet another zombie issue, health care, because it turned out that Obamacare, despite all the massive brainpower behind it, had some “glitches,” in the same sense that the universe has some “atoms.”

Read it all. It will make you wish an actual zombie apocalypse had happened.

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The Obama administration essentially admits that Obamacare has increased the number of uninsured.

9:02 am

The Obama administration essentially admits that Obamacare has increased the number of uninsured.

The signups on the Obamacare website have been far below their goals. Meanwhile, the numbers of people who have had their insurance cancelled is far far higher. The result: fewer people insured.

Way to go, Democrats!

And then there’s this: Five Obamacare news stories to watch out for in 2014.

Except for the midterm elections, none sound like they will be good news.

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The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.

8:42 am

The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.

The installation of the cameras proceeded according to plan and without incident. During a spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts were able to transport the cameras to their mounting position and install them quickly and efficiently. However, soon after installation, the Mission Control Centre (MCC) outside of Moscow was unable to receive any data from either camera (contrary to what was reported during the live transmission of the spacewalk). Without this data, engineers in the MCC were not able to confirm that the cameras were receiving the power necessary to allow them to survive the temperature fluctuations of the space environment. As a consequence, senior technical personnel from UrtheCast and RSC Energia (UrtheCast’s Russian partner) jointly decided that the safest and most prudent course of action was to uninstall the cameras and bring them back inside the ISS to be reinstalled at a later date, once the data transmission problem has been solved.

UrtheCast’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. George Tyc, was present at the MCC throughout the operation, along with the Company’s Chief Engineer for Space Systems, Mr. Greg Giffin. Said Dr. Tyc, “The fact the neither camera could communicate with the MCC strongly suggests that the problem lies inside the ISS and it is not a problem with the cameras or external cables. This kind of issue has been encountered before on the ISS and can be fixed in the near-term. Bringing the cameras back inside to be installed another day was simply the right engineering decision.”

No word on what caused the problem, but as this commercial project is being done in partnership with the Russians and the Russians are whom the company is working to solve the technical problem it was almost certainly on the Russian portion of ISS.

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A tea party look at 2013.

10:13 pm

A tea party look at 2013.

In 2013, the five-year old conservative grassroots upsurge has grabbed Washington, D.C. by the collar, tearing the city colloquially known as “Boomtown” in a conservative direction for the first time in decades.

Though the article sees far more success in 2013 for tea party politicians than I think is warranted, I also think it does outline the birth of the future. The left is increasingly old and out of touch. The tea party, small now, has got the right ideas, and will thus grow stronger with time — assuming of course that it stays true to those ideas.

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Obamacare includes absurd regulations that will cost the vending machine industry millions.

8:52 am

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare includes absurd regulations that will cost the vending machine industry millions.

Around 457 pages into Obamcare, section 4205 stipulates “the vending machine operator shall provide a sign in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button that includes a clear and conspicuous statement disclosing the number of calories contained in the article.” This new mandate will cost the vending machine industry an estimated $25.8 million initially and an additional $24 million for every subsequent year.

Expect some companies to go out a business because of this craziness.

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The first person to cycle to the South Pole.

8:43 am

The first person to cycle to the South Pole.

Leijerstam used a modified version of the commercially-available Sprint trike, made by recumbent tricycle manufacturer Inspired Cycle Engineering (ICE). She chose to go with a recumbent trike because it would allow her to maintain stability in the often very-high winds. This allowed her to concentrate simply on moving forward, instead of having to waste time and effort keeping her balance. The strategy paid off, as she not only made it, but also beat two other cyclists who had set out for the Pole on two-wheelers, days before her Dec. 17th start date.

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SpaceX successfully completed a static fire engine test Saturday in preparation for its next commercial satellite launch on January 3.

8:41 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX successfully completed a static fire engine test Saturday in preparation for its next commercial satellite launch on January 3.

It will be a busy next two months for commercial space. Cygnus is scheduled to launch on January 7, while Dragon makes its next flight on February 22. During that same time period a Russian Progress freighter will be launched. Also, there will be two Ariane 5 launches and one Proton launch, plus one commercial launch by India along with that country’s first launch of its home-built GSLV rocket.

As I say, the competition is heating up.

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India has now scheduled January 5 as the date for the test launch of its homebuilt powerful GSLV rocket.

10:47 pm

The competition heats up: India has now set January 5 as the date for the test launch of its homebuilt powerful GSLV rocket.

India’s needs this more powerful rocket if they are going to be a serious player in the new colonial movement in space. They have had many problems over the past decade trying to get it operational. Maybe now they will finally succeed.

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Today’s spacewalk by two Russian astronauts on ISS set a new Russian duration record though one of the two commercial cameras was unable to transmit its data to the ground.

3:23 pm

Today’s spacewalk by two Russian astronauts on ISS set a new Russian duration record though one of the two commercial cameras installed was unable to transmit its data to the ground.

For reasons that are unclear, the astronauts were then instructed to disconnect both cameras and bring them back inside ISS. This caused the cancellation of a number of other tasks and was the reason the spacewalk was the longest ever by Russian astronauts.

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Were the dinosaurs covered by feathers or scales? Scientists disagree.

9:11 am

Were the dinosaurs covered by feathers or scales? Two scientists find that most had scales.

Palaeontologists Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London and David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto created a database of all known impressions of dinosaur skin tissues. They then identified those that had feathers or feather-like structures, and considered relationships in the dinosaurian family tree.

The results, which Barrett revealed at the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology’s annual meeting in Los Angeles in late October, indicate that although some ornithischians, such as Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong, had quills or filaments in their skin, the overwhelming majority had scales or armour. Among sauropods, scales were also the norm.

The uncertainty of science: Don’t bet any money on this result. The number of dinosaur fossils actually known is relatively tiny — making the overall database tiny as well — and further discoveries could change everything.

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Photos taken 33 years ago by a photographer who died in the Mt. St. Helens eruption have been discovered and developed.

9:52 pm

Photos taken 33 years ago by a photographer who died in the Mt. St. Helens eruption have been discovered and developed.

Reid Blackburn took the photographs in April 1980 during a flight over the simmering volcano. When he got back to The Columbian studio, Blackburn set that roll of film aside. It was never developed. On May 18, 1980 — about five weeks later — Blackburn died in the volcanic blast that obliterated the mountain peak.

Those unprocessed black-and-white images spent the next three decades coiled inside that film canister. The Columbian’s photo assistant Linda Lutes recently discovered the roll in a studio storage box, and it was finally developed.

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Obama’s top ten Constitutional violations for 2013.

4:36 pm

The Obama administration’s top ten Constitutional violations for 2013.

The sad thing about this list is that it is incomplete, and it is only for 2013. Moreover, anyone who has been honestly following the news for the past five years will recognize most of these abuses. However, #9 was new to me, and just as egregious.

Responding to complaints about the University of Montana’s handling of sexual assault claims, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, in conjunction with the Justice Department, sent the university a letter intended as a national “blueprint” for tackling sexual harassment. The letter urges a crackdown on “unwelcome” speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere “more likely than not” standard.

Isn’t it nice how this administration is working hard to recreate Great Britain’s abusive and tyrannical Star Chamber?

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Under Obamacare more than half the counties in the 34 states that use the federal Obamacare health exchange have no affordable insurance plans.

10:58 am

What’s not in it: Under Obamacare more than half the counties in the 34 states that use the federal Obamacare health exchange have no affordable insurance plans.

Don’t worry, your doctor won’t see you anyway!

Aren’t we all glad the Democrats stood firm in Congress to make sure this law went into effect?

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Here come the Obamacare tax bills!

10:02 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Here come the Obamacare tax bills!

The new taxes on one customer’s bill added up to $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, according to Kaiser Health News. It boosted the monthly premium from $322.26 to $345.40 for that individual. The new taxes and fees include a 2 percent levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018. There’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Insurers pay a 3.5 percent user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov Web site.

This list doesn’t include the hidden tax imposed on medical equipment that will also be passed on to customers.

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Insufficiently servile.

10:02 pm

Insufficiently servile.

As he concludes,

So, that was my contact with the DoD police today. At every confrontation, they clearly expected me to respond with the appropriate degree of subservience, and were baffled and angered that I refused to do so. So, they couldn’t let it go. They just kept coming back to my office, as if repeated confrontations would make me more, rather than less, servile. And all this for something that wasn’t any sort of criminal offense.

It says a lot—none of it good—that the police seem to have the expectation of unquestioning obedience. It also says a lot that they seem used to getting it, which is our fault, not theirs.

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