Astronomers have found the largest yellow star yet, 1,300 times bigger than the Sun.
Penny wise pound foolish: The Obama administration budget proposal for NASA included shutting down Opportunity in 2015.
This is very stupid. It costs about a billion dollars to build a rover and get it to Mars. And that’s assuming everything works. Opportunity is already there and functioning flawlessly at a fraction of that cost. Rather than cutting Opportunity, NASA should consider cutting the new rover mission so that the money could be used for other planetary exploration, such as a mission to Titan.
The bigotry of modern academics: The faculty at Rutgers have voted to demand the university rescind its speaker invitation to Condoleezza Rice.
They aren’t bigoted against blacks, they are bigoted against Republicans and conservatives. As I’ve said before, they want to stand there with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears chanting, “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-LA!” so they don’t have to hear any alternative perspectives.
According to 2013 FBI statistics, all ten of the nation’s most dangerous cities are run by Democrats.
Could it be gun control? Or maybe the oppressive atmosphere of an over-regulated society? Or the lack of prosperity due to the squelching of freedom? Take your pick.
The low information congresswoman: Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) thinks the Constitution is 400 years old.
It is bad enough that the voters don’t know much about their country’s history. It is terrifying to find out how little some elected officials know.
The evil polices of that evil Republican Scott Walker has now produced a $1 billion budget surplus in Wisconsin.
Senate Republicans Tuesday narrowly passed Gov. Scott Walker’s $541 million tax cut proposal in a vote that guaranteed the cuts will become law.
The tax decreases — the third round of cuts by Republicans in less than a year — passed 17-15 with GOP Sen. Dale Schultz of Richland Center joining all Democrats in voting against the proposal. The proposal now goes to the Assembly, which passed a different version of the tax cuts last month with two Democrats joining all Republicans in supporting it.
With growing tax collections now expected to give the state a $1billion budget surplus in June 2015, Walker’s bill will cut property and income taxes for families and businesses, and zero out all income taxes for manufacturers in the state. [emphasis mine]
Why is it that even with gigantic and yearly surpluses Democrats still oppose tax cuts? Or do we already know the answer?
The senator who aggressively supported the federal government’s illegal spying on innocent Americans is shocked and offended that they also spied on her.
For liberals, the rules are never meant for them. Instead, the rules are made by liberals to be imposed on everyone else, whom they consider too stupid to deserve either privacy or freedom.
Update: I have to amend my previous sentence. It isn’t just liberals who think the rules should never apply to them. We also have to include pompous power-hungry politicians on the right as well.
Climategate continues: “What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates.”
That’s the opinion of one of a number of scientists who were classified by a study to be part of the 97% consensus that supports human-caused global warming. The article asked them if the study’s classification was true, and their response was that the study was a fraud, a lie, a distortion, and simply untrue. The so-called 97% consensus was manufactured out of thin air, as many of the scientists included in it are actually global warming skeptics.
The quote that stood out most to me in the article was this one:
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The new fascism: A new report by the largest coalition of biomedical research organizations has found that animal rights extremists have shifted their tactics, increasingly targeting individuals rather then universities in their violent attacks.
[The report was designed] to provide guidance to scientists and institutions around the world in dealing with animal rights extremists. That includes individuals and groups that damage laboratories, send threatening e-mails, and even desecrate the graves of researchers’ relatives. In 2004, for example, Animal Liberation Front activists broke into psychology laboratories at the University of Iowa, where they smashed equipment, spray-painted walls, and removed hundreds of animals, causing more than $400,000 in damage. In 2009, extremists set fire to the car of a University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist who worked on rats and monkeys. And other researchers say activists have shown up at their homes in the middle of the night, threatening their families and children. [emphasis mine]
To attack the relatives and children of researchers is beyond offensive, and places you on the same level as the typical Islamic terrorist. Such behavior cannot be condoned by anyone, and should be opposed aggressively by all parties, even those who oppose the use of animals in research.
The competition heats up: Lockheed Martin announced on Wednesday that they will either give a full refund or re-fly a payload for free if their Atlas rocket fails at launch.
This means that Lockheed Martin’s customers will no longer have to shop or pay for insurance. Instead, the company is providing it for them free, thus lowering the cost for those customers.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter entered safe mode on Friday, caused by unexpected switch to a backup computer.
They expect to get the probe back into full operation in a couple of days.
To serve and protect? Here’s one cop’s take: “I give my left nut to bang down your door and come for your gun.”
The competition heats up: The Russian company that owns the Proton rocket is considering a redesign that would allow them to launch two satellites on one rocket.
Launching two or more satellites during a single launch is not ground-breaking technology, but the Russian have never done it with their Proton. If they make this change, it will allow them to reduce the cost for a commercial launch considerably, thus making them more competitive against companies like SpaceX.
That they have decided to consider this now, after almost three decades of commercial operation since the fall of the Soviet Union, is more proof that the low prices of SpaceX are forcing innovation and an effort to lower costs across the entire launch market.
Update: My statement above about Proton never launching more than one satellite is wrong. They have done it numerous times, something I am very aware of but for some reason completely forgot when I was writing this post. (The jet lag from the trip to Israel must still be affecting my brain.) In fact, they have just rolled to the launchpad a Proton with two communications satellites on board, a fact that makes the story at the first link above very puzzling.
Two Russians and an American landed safely in Kazakhstan on Monday, finishing their 166 mission to ISS.
The Americans have not yet been kidnapped by the Russian government over the U.S./Russian conflict because of the invasion of the Crimea. Nor do I expect them to.
My heart bleeds: The IAU has issued a press release condemning the public’s naming of Martian craters as initiated by the private company Uwingu.
This war over the right to name features on other planets is mostly a tempest in a teapot, as the actual names will finally be decided by the people who end up living there. Nonetheless, I really like how Uwingu is pushing the IAU’s buttons, as that organization’s self-righteous insistence that it has the power to name everything in space, from craters to the smallest boulders, has for years struck me as pompous and wrong.
The Milky Way’s council of galaxies.
“All bright galaxies within 20 million light years, including us, are organized in a ‘Local Sheet’ 34-million light years across and only 1.5-million light years thick,” says McCall. “The Milky Way and Andromeda are encircled by twelve large galaxies arranged in a ring about 24-million light years across – this ‘Council of Giants’ stands in gravitational judgment of the Local Group by restricting its range of influence.”
McCall says twelve of the fourteen giants in the Local Sheet, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, are “spiral galaxies” which have highly flattened disks in which stars are forming. The remaining two are more puffy “elliptical galaxies”, whose stellar bulks were laid down long ago. Intriguingly, the two ellipticals sit on opposite sides of the Council. Winds expelled in the earliest phases of their development might have shepherded gas towards the Local Group, thereby helping to build the disks of the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Petty fascist thugs: Emails now show that the the closure of open access monuments that needed no staff during October’s government shutdown was planned by National Park management.
The emails show that park employees knew there was no reason to shutter these monuments and doing so would actually cost money, something that made no sense since the shutdown was supposedly preventing them from spending money.
Pushback: Connecticut police are now threatening to refuse to enforce that state’s new oppressive gun control law.
250 law enforcement officers in Connecticut have signed an open letter stating that they will not enforce the new anti-gun and magazine laws, which they consider to be a violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The comet that the European probe Rosetta will visit in August has awakened.
Already 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is approximately 50 percent brighter than in the last images from October 2013. While the comet has moved another 50 million kilometers closer to Earth in this time (and 80 million kilometers closer to the Sun), the increase in brightness cannot be explained by the smaller distance alone. “The new image suggests that 67P is beginning to emit gas and dust at a relatively large distance from the Sun”, says Colin Snodgrass from the MPS. This confirms a study presented by Snodgrass and his colleagues last year in which they had compared the comet’s brightness as recorded during its previous orbits around the Sun. The calculations showed that already in March 2014 its activity would be measurable from Earth.
Update: A preprint paper published today on the astro-ph website predicts that Rosetta will see an unusual topographical feature on the comet’s surface when it arrives in August:
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The Secular Light Curve (SLC) of this comet exhibits a photometric anomaly in magnitude that is present in 1982, 1996, 2002 and 2009. Thus it must be real. We interpret this anomaly as a topographic feature on the surface of the nucleus that may be a field of debris, a region made only of dust or an area of solid stones but in any case it is depleted in volatiles. We predict that images taken by spacecraft Rosseta will show a region morphologically different to the rest of the nucleus, at the pole pointing to the Sun near perihelion.
A scientist describes the skeptic’s view of global warming.
And since good science should be founded of skepticism, he ends up describing the actual state of climate research, outlining all the uncertainties with great clarity and intelligence.
On Saturday SpaceX successfully conducted a dress rehearsal countdown and static fire engine test of the Falcon 9 rocket that will loft a Dragon capsule to ISS next week.
The results of the test itself have not been released, but that it was completed suggests all is well for the upcoming launch.
Standing on the wrong side of history: Neil deGrasse Tyson poo-poos private space.
Tyson described space travel as “a long-term investment”: “It’s an investment that private enterprise cannot lead.” He recalled the excitement around SpaceX’s delivery of cargo the International Space Station, which sparked discussion about whether private companies would replace government as the main engine behind space travel. Tyson’s response? “They brought cargo to the space station! NASA’s been doing that for 30 years!”
Tyson, who also said that government is the only one willing to do exploration and that private space only comes after, will probably push this agenda on his new Cosmos television series.
On this subject, Tyson has the outdated opinions of today’s leftwing academic community. And he is wrong. The only reasons private space didn’t lead in the past fifty years is because our federal government was against it. It wanted the turf all to itself and the private companies who could have done it were willing to acquiesce. Now that this monopoly is crumbling, stand by to see private enterprise dominate the show.
Finding out what’s in it: A major union charges in a new report that Obamacare will reduce wages, cut hours, and limit access to health insurance for the lower middle class.
Union head Donald “D.” Taylor, in a note also being sent to Congress, demands changes and admits to being reluctant to bash a president his union supported. “Believe me; I enter this entire debate about the consequences of the ACA with a deep reluctance,” he wrote. “Unite Here was the first union to endorse then-Senator Obama. We support the addition of health care to millions of Americans. Yet facts are facts, and Obamacare will cost our members the equivalent of a significant pay cut to keep their hard-won benefits.”
In other words, he is a blind partisan fool. His partisanship is so strong that even now he is reluctant to attack the President or the Democrats for creating and forcing Obamacare on us. He also is so partisan that when they were writing the bill he accepted blindly what they were telling him and thus didn’t bother to read the law himself. Then again, he really didn’t have to read it, all he really had to do was listen to just a handful of conservative thinkers who were saying then that Obamacare would “reduce wages, cut hours, and limit access to health insurance.”
The most shameful part of this whole thing is that come the next election, this union chief and his union will almost certainly still back the Democrats blindly.
On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in January. As I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations.
January was the most active month for sunspots this entire solar cycle, exceeding the predictions of the solar scientists, an event that has been quite rare during this generally weak solar maximum. In fact, the Sun was so active that for the first time, the second peak in a double-peaked solar maximum exceeded the first peak in sunspot activity.
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Finding out what’s not in it: Connecticut seniors are in an uproar because their AARP health insurance plan was forced to sever ties with their hospital and doctors because of Obamacare.
AARP was a big supporter of Obamacare. A majority of these blue-state seniors probably voted for Obama as well.I wonder if they will now wake up and change their support now, or remain blind followers of a disastrous policy.
Taking a close look at the engineering and history of SpaceX’s new Raptor engine, presently under development.
Quite fascinating and absolutely worth a read.
A static fire engine test of the Falcon 9 scheduled to lift Dragon to ISS next week has been delayed one day.
The article gives no explanation for the delay.
According to the company’s CEO, Virgin Galactic is close to getting its FAA launch license.
The CEO also said that they hope to fly their first suborbital flight this summer after several lower altitude powered flights.
At this point I will believe this when I see it. Virgin Galactic has made promises like this repeatedly for the past three years, none of which have come true. The time has come for them to put up, or shut up, or finally tell us the truth.
Most Mars meteorites found on Earth may have been blasted here from a single impact on Mars around 3 million years ago.
This is a great scientific detective story. It has a lot of uncertainties, should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, but is nonetheless very convincing.
