Category: Behind The Black

US judge to rule on Obamacare today

11:47 am

Repeal it already! Another US judge is expected to rule on Obamacare today. Key quote:

The judge, Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Florida, was expected to rule on a lawsuit brought by governors and attorneys general from 26 U.S. states, almost all of whom are Republicans. Obama is a Democrat. The plaintiffs represent more than half the U.S. states, so the Pensacola case has more prominence than some two dozen lawsuits filed in federal courts over the healthcare law.

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Challenger accident, 25 years ago

8:03 pm

An evening pause: Twenty-five years ago today.

The final words in Reagan’s speech come from a poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ing there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

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Electric cars and their cold-weather shortcomings

11:38 am

Reality meets feel-good politics: Electric cars and their cold-weather shortcomings. Key quote:

“If you live in an area where the winters get extremely cold an all-electric vehicle will have to be garaged and equipped with some kind of plug-in battery warmer for it to be effective in the coldest months of the year. Keep these thoughts in mind if you’re planning an electric car purchase; we don’t want you finding out the range of your car has been halved when it’s five below zero and you’re fifteen miles from home.”

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Egyptians brace for Friday protests as internet, messaging disrupted

11:29 am

The triumph of freedom: Protests spread to Egypt and Jordan.

We should recognize that though the overthrow of these Middle East dictatorships is certainly not a bad thing, the regimes that replace them are very likely not going to be much better, and could very well be worse. However, the free flow of information in the Arab world can only be a good thing, and in the long run can only lead to freedom and peace between nations.

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Challenger, 25 years later

11:03 am

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger accident. There are innumerable links from many sources talking about the event, too many for me to list here. You can find most at this link on Jeff Foust’s website, spacetoday.net.

Though I think it is very important for us to remember and honor these events, I have become somewhat disenchanted with the modern American obsession with memorials and anniversaries. Rather than build a memorial, I’d much rather we focused entirely on building new spaceships, new space stations, and new lunar bases, while flying multi-year missions on ISS, all in preparation for exploring and colonizing the solar system.

If we actually made the solar system a place for humans to live in and explore, we would build a far better memorial to those who have sacrificed their lives for the sake of exploration. And I think these heroes would be far more pleased by that memorial than by a stone statue or emotional op-ed that describes their courage.

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Arab world shaken by power of Twitter and Facebook

11:00 pm

The truimph of freedom: The Arab world, shaken by the power of the internet. Key quote:

On Dec. 17, in Sidi Bouzid, deep in the interior, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself aflame in front of a government building, in protest after police confiscated his produce stand. Horrible images of his act circulated lightning-fast on the Internet. Protests followed.

“Thanks to Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, images of those first protests went around the world instantly, and everyone knew about it,” says Tlili. “Even 20 years ago, you could have had those uprisings in the interior and few would have known.”

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A Fizzy Ocean on Enceladus

6:39 pm

A fizzy ocean on Enceladus? Key quote:

[Scientists believe] that gasses dissolved in water deep below the surface [of Enceladus] form bubbles. Since the density of the resulting “sparkling water” is less than that of the ice, the liquid ascends quickly up through the ice to the surface. “Most of the water spreads out sideways and ‘warms’ a thin surface ice lid, which is about 300 feet thick,” explains Matson. “But some of it collects in subsurface chambers, builds up pressure, and then blasts out through small holes in the ground, like soda spewing out of that can you opened.”

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New research finds that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting

5:56 pm

New research finds that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting. Key quote:

The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.

The last part of the above quote, on global warming, is almost certainly an overstatement of what we do or don’t know. Warming will cause glaciers to melt, but how much and when are factors that are still not understood. Moreover, we are still not sure how much warming has even occurred.

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