Author: Robert Zimmerman

A dying woman, refused a private screening at a TSA checkpoint, was patted down in public and forced to remove her bandages.

3:54 pm

Does this make you feel safer? A dying woman, refused a private screening at a TSA checkpoint, was patted down in public and forced to remove her bandages.

They also destroyed some of her medicine. Worse, she called ahead to make sure she was doing everything correctly in order to get past the TSA thugs as easily as possible. Obviously, it didn’t work.

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To avoid the cost of Obamacare, companies are reducing their full time stuff and switching as many employees to part-time as possible.

9:18 am

Finding out what’s in it: To avoid the cost of Obamacare, companies are reducing their full time staff and switching as many employees to part-time as possible.

It is very simple. The regulatory cost of Obamacare is so high companies are doing anything they can to avoid it. It is for this reason that they stopped hiring almost the instant the law was passed, and are now scrambling to find other ways to survive outside its influence.

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Resurrecting the chestnut tree.

9:15 pm

Resurrecting the chestnut tree.

As chief scientist of the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF), a group of chestnut enthusiasts and scientists, Hebard has bred thousands of hybrids at the organization’s research farm in Meadowview, Virginia. He crosses descendants of the original American chestnut with the much smaller Chinese variety (Castanea mollissima), which has some natural immunity to the Asian fungus. And after decades of work, he is within reach of his goal, a tall American tree with enough Chinese traits to keep it healthy. Other researchers are trying to attack the blight with viruses or are creating trees that are genetically modified (GM) to resist the fungus, and could be the first GM forest trees released in the wild in the United States. Progress with all three approaches is raising hopes that chestnuts will soon start to flourish again in the forests of the American east. “We’re starting to pull the American chestnut tree back from the brink of extinction,” says Hebard.

This work is an example of human behavior at its best, using our ability to adapt as well as our brains to help another species come back to life. And we aren’t doing just to help the trees. Bringing the chestnut tree back will benefit us as well as other species.

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An update on the Falcon 9 engine problems.

4:09 pm

An update on the Falcon 9 engine problems.

Based on SpaceX’s press release, the rocket functioned as designed to overcome the engine failure. Nonetheless, it behooves them to find out why that engine shut down prematurely.

More worrisome for the company is the failure the Falcon 9 rocket to place in its proper orbit a secondary payload, an Orbcomm communications satellite. The satellite ended up in too low an orbit, probably because of the engine failure during launch. Orbcomm has a contract with SpaceX to launch a whole series of these satellites. This failure now, right at the get-go, won’t do them much good in terms of public relations.

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The Obama administration had declared that a company whose sole business is to publish Bibles is not religious enough for an exemption to the HHS contraceptive mandate.

9:22 am

The Obama administration had declared that a company whose sole business is to publish Bibles is not religious enough for an exemption to the HHS contraceptive mandate.

The company has of course gone to court. The mandate itself is odious and unconstitutional. It is not the business of the federal government to decide who is religious and who is not. Nor is it that government’s business to force behavior on anyone that they do not believe.

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A GAO investigation into fraudulent and foreign campaign donations has discovered that the Obama.com website is owned and managed by a man in China with ties to the Chinese government.

9:02 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: A GAO investigation into fraudulent and foreign campaign donations has discovered that the Obama.com website is owned and managed by a man in China with ties to the Chinese government.

That’s not all.

The unusual Obama.com website redirects traffic directly to a donation page on the Obama campaign’s official website, my.barackobama.com, which does not require donors to enter their credit card security code (known as the CVV code), thereby increasing the likelihood of foreign or fraudulent donations. The website is managed by a small web development firm, Wicked Global, in Maine. One of Wicked Global’s employees, Greg Dorr, lists on his LinkedIn page his additional employment with Peace Action Maine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. According to the GAI report, 68 percent of all Internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign visitors.

The Obama administration had this same problem in 2008. Donations to its website did not verify the donation, allowing donations from anywhere, even if illegal or from foreign sources. There’s more here.

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One engine of the Falcon 9 failed during launch.

8:43 am

Confirmed: One engine of the Falcon 9 exploded during launch.

Video at the link. The other 8 engines picked up the slack — as designed — and got Dragon into orbit.

This spectacular engine failure will of course have to be reviewed. However, if I were a commercial satellite company looking for a rocket to get my satellites into orbit, this failure would be recommendation, not a deterrent. The Falcon 9 demonstrated that even if one engine fails (and this one did by blowing up!), the rocket can survive the failure and make it to orbit. If that isn’t clear proof that this is a well designed and well built rocket, nothing is.

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How ABC News destroyed a company with false allegations, and is now being sued for $1.2 billion because of it.

6:23 am

How ABC News destroyed a company with false allegations, and is now being sued for $1.2 billion because of it.

Though this attack by ABC was not obviously political, it followed the same pattern as their coverage of politics. They had an agenda, they pursued it without mercy, and they did so with a complete disregard for the facts. I hope they lose big in this case.

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A star has gone supernova and astronomers get to see it from the very beginning, and even earlier!

7:05 pm

A star has gone supernova and astronomers get to see it from the very beginning, and even earlier!

The star had erupted several times before but had not produced a real supernova explosion. On September 26 it finally did so. Moreover, astronomers have images of the star prior to any eruption, information that until recently was not available for any supernovae.

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NASA and the Russians have agreed to fly a two-person year long mission on ISS beginning in the spring of 2015.

6:58 pm

It’s now official: NASA and the Russians have agreed to fly a two-person year long mission on ISS beginning in the spring of 2015.

NASA has denied that this agreement has any connection with the Sarah Brightman/Russian deal, but I still wonder. Either way, it is very good news. Not only will they finally be using ISS appropriately, a mission like this will generate some real excitement for space exploration that the repeated boring six month expeditions to ISS have failed to do. Even better would be to schedule a two year mission, simulating a journey to and from Mars.

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Painting in the Skies

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Fran McKendree, vocal, guitar; Lindsey Blount, vocal; River Guerguerian, percussion; Charles Milling, bass, vocal; Duncan Wickel, violin.

Words and music by Fran McKendree.

There is a painting in the skies,
Reflects the longing in your eyes.
Horizon widens, river bends,
Awakening that never ends.

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Deep Impact fired its engines today to adjust its orbit, giving it the option of visiting a near Earth asteroid in the future.

6:01 pm

Deep Impact fired its engines today to adjust its orbit, giving it the option of visiting a near Earth asteroid in the future.

The press release is very vague about this future mission. I suspect there is a question of funding, which means that even if they can go to the asteroid, they might not have the funds to staff the mission.

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Astronomers have discovered a star that circles the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way in only 11.5 years.

5:57 pm

Dizzy: Astronomers have discovered a star that circles the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way in only 11.5 years.

This newly discovered star joins another that is 15 times brighter and has a 16 year orbit. The combined orbital data from both will allow astronomers to measure precisely the size of the black hole while also measuring the distortion of space caused by its intense gravitational field.

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