A good hack: MIT students last week turned a 21-story building into a huge game of Tetris. More here, including links to video.
An evening pause: Nice song, from Andrea Glass.
What could possibly go wrong? On Wednesday Obama announced he would override Congress and release of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority (PA), with no strings attached.
Not only is this insane, considering the murderous behavior of the PA, it seems to me that the U.S. has this document called the Constitution, which clearly stipulations that Congress, not the President, determines how money can be spent. If Congress says no, the President isn’t legally allowed to do it. The article above is vague about this issue, so it is possible that Obama is acting legally here. However, based on his previous behavior, I remain suspicious.
A more detailed analysis of Obama’s action can be found here. It appears my suspicions are correct.
Congress deliberately froze those funds, and not just because of the statehood demand through UNESCO. Hamas, a terrorist organization, reconciled with Fatah and has rejoined the PA, which means we’re putting almost $200 million into the hands of a terrorist organization. The language of the Palestinian Accountability Act could not be clearer: “[N]o funds available to any United States Government department or agency … may be obligated or expended with respect to providing funds to the Palestinian Authority.” Obama literally waived that statutory language off yesterday afternoon. [emphasis mine]
For this President, a supposed Constitutional lawyer, the law is always such an inconvenient thing. He somehow thinks that, under our legal system, he can rule by dictate, something that any legal scholar would tell him is wrong.
The faster we get this power-hungry man out of office, the better.
A political squabble between Russia and Kazakhstan has delayed the launch of a European weather satellite.
Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada have successfully completed wind tunnel tests of their commercial manned spaceships.
In closing down its ATV cargo freighter assembly line, Europe considers its next manned space project.
ESA and NASA have been discussing how ESA might compensate NASA for Europe’s 8.3 percent share of the international space station’s future operating charges. Until about 2017, the agency is repaying NASA, as the station’s general contractor, through launches of European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) cargo ships to the station. But with the station partners now all but committed to operating the station at least through 2020, ESA is searching for another “barter element” to succeed ATV.
NASA has said a propulsion module for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle would fill ESA’s obligations to NASA, which have been estimated at about 450 million euros ($600 million) over three years.
But several ESA members, notably France and Italy, have argued that the Orion module, which would use ATV-derived technologies, does not provide sufficient technology interest or public impact. Instead, these governments have proposed development of a vehicle that would perform multiple tasks in low Earth orbit, including debris removal.
Want to watch the launch of Falcon 9/Dragon? Here’s the low down.
An evening pause: R.I.P. Davy Jones. This reunion performance, which included Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, and Peter Tork of the Monkees, occurred on June 16, 2011 at the Beacon Theater, New York City. Less than a year later, Davy Jones had passed away.
Though the audio isn’t great, the joy of the song and those singing it comes through loud and clear. Go here to hear the song as performed in 1967.
Another new breathtaking Hubble image of the Egg Nebula.
The image combines data taken in both optical and infrared wavelengths.
A victory of sorts for freedom: The Labor Department has abandoned its effort to ban kids from working on farms.
The reason I consider this merely a temporary victory is that the desire to regulate these matters still exists in the people running the federal government. These same people also don’t understand that, as a free nation, they have no moral right to impose these rules in the first place. Thus, they remain a threat, waiting only for another opportunity to try again.
The competition continues to heat up: Engineers in Great Britain have begun testing a new hybrid engine for lifting a spaceplane into orbit.
Three astronauts have returned safely to Earth in their Soyuz capsule after spending 165 days on ISS.
Coiling lava found on Mars.
An underground military bunker, all your own!
Condo thugs strike again! A condo association threatened a woman with fines for following her religion and placing a Jewish mezuzah on her doorpost.
Fortunately the condo association backed down. Nonetheless, this is a good example why I hate these kinds of real estate organizations.
Watch a video of a single glacier’s terminus, covering eight years of retreat.
The financial foolishness in Congress, by Republicans this time, continues. In making its budget recommendations for NASA, the report [pdf] of the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee also demands that NASA immediately choose one commercial company for its commercial space program. (Hat tip to Clark Lindsey for spotting this.)
The number of ways this action is counter-productive almost can’t be counted.
» Read more
The competition continues to heat up: India yesterday successfully launched its own all-weather imaging satellite.
Want to give your property away? Post on Facebook, Google or a number of other social media websites.
Three new Earthlike exoplanets, orbiting M dwarf stars in the habitable zone, have been identified by astronomers using Kepler data.
News you can use: Five things you didn’t know about Silly Putty.
This should make you you feel safer: Four TSA screeners have been charged with accepting cash in exchange for allowing drug smugglers to pass through security.
And in related news: A family missed its flight after TSA agents insisted on giving a seven-year-old girl with cerebral palsy a full pat-down.
Duck! New data suggests that the giant ancient asteroid barrage during the early solar system may have lasted much longer than previously thought.
An evening pause: Truly Walt Disney’s most frenetic and surreal animated films.
Twinkle twinkle little bat,
How I wonder what you’re at.
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
A new study by astronomers has found a vast structure of satellite galaxies and star clusters aligned perpendicular to the Milky Way and extending outward above and below the galaxy’s nucleus by as much as a million light years.
In their effort to understand exactly what surrounds our Galaxy, the scientists used a range of sources from twentieth century photographic plates to images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey. Using all these data they assembled a picture that includes bright ‘classical’ satellite galaxies, more recently detected fainter satellites and the younger globular clusters.
“Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged”, says Pawlowski. The astronomers found that all the different objects are distributed in a plane at right angles to the galactic disk. The newly-discovered structure is huge, extending from as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the centre of the Galaxy.
An animation illustrating this galactic distribution is posted below the fold. You can read the actual preprint paper here.
The problem with this polar alignment with the Milky Way’s core is that the theories for explaining the distribution of dark matter do not predict it.
» Read more
To mine the asteroids, first build small cheap space telescopes.
The space telescope will be based on the same design Planetary Resources will eventually use for its asteroid-prospecting spacecraft: a 30-kilogram to 50-kilogram flier packed with imaging sensors and a laser-optical communication system the company is developing to avoid encumbering its spacecraft with large antennas. The company, which says it has about two dozen employees, will market these spacecraft as cheap but effective telescopes for both astronomical and Earth-observing applications. Sales would provide cash for the company’s core work on asteroid mining, Eric Anderson, co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources, said.
The telescope slated for launch sometime in the next two years “would be something, let’s say, a university buys [for astronomical observations], or a commercial company that wants to monitor shipping traffic or something like that,” Anderson said in a phone interview. The cost for the telescope, which Planetary Resources is calling Arkyd-101, would be “millions of dollars, including launch.”
At the Planetary Resources press conference today, there was a lot of talk about the benefits and profits to be gained from mining the asteroids. However, this ain’t gonna happen for quite a few years. In the meantime, the company plans to make money building space telescopes which scientists and others can use, for a fee, to do research.
In other words, the government and astronomers dropped the ball on replacing the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, private enterprise is going to pick it up and run with it.
SpaceX and NASA have now set May 7 as the planned launch date for the Dragon test flight to ISS.
