An evening pause: Though Vera-Ellen made only a handful of films and is not that well known today, during the late 1940s and 1950s she was one of Hollywood’s top female dancers. Here she performs a delightful dance number from the film Call Me Madame (1953).
An Evening Pause: Let’s have some more music, this time something so deeply beautiful it makes the heart ache: Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli singing Time to Say Goodbye.
Posting today shall be very quiet, mostly because I am out in West Virginia, exploring a previously unknown upper level in a cave we are mapping. This passage was only discovered last month by Aaron Moses, John Harman, and Pete Johnson, who did a bolt climb of over 70 feet to reach a high lead in the wall of the cave. This weekend we will be pushing and mapping these virgin passages. Below is a picture taken by Brian Masney of Aaron Moses as he worked his way up the wall, with Pete Johnson providing a belay. More of Brian’s pictures can be seen on his Flicker webpage.
An evening pause: One of the best television science series ever produced was The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. Rather than simply describe science and knowledge, Bronowski instead pondered the nature of humanity. The best episode of the series was Knowledge or Certainty, in which Bronowski compared the humane uncertainty of science with the terrible consequences of dogma. As Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Want to know who invented the basic technology that made possible CD and DVD players possible? Take a look at this restrospective describing the discovery, from Physical Review Focus of the American Physcial Society.
It appears we are entering the dry season on Titan. Scientists have observed a 1 meter drop in the levels of Titan’s methane lakes over the last four years as the seasons on the moon go from summer to fall. Fun quote: “[The scientists] report that the shoreline of Ontario Lacus receded by about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from June 2005 to July 2009.”
An AP report today says that the infrared WISE space telescope has catalogued 25,000 new asteroids, 95 of which are near Earth objects. Actual data, however, has not yet been released.
Liberty of conscious update. Further news on that story of a college professor fired for teaching Catholic doctrines (on homosexuality) in a Catholic doctrines class.
O joy! It’s time to favor gender over achievement at NASA. The Obama administration is considering using governmental authority at NASA and other agencies to guarantee that the same number of women receive science, technology, engineering, and math degrees as men. The actual White House statement emphasizes the need “to ensure equity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education programs.” [emphasis mine].
If you want to be really annoyed, download NASA’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity documentation [pdf] and read how institutions are expected to do “periodic reviews of data broken down by gender. . . to ensure program policies and practices are not having a negative impact on program participation.” [page 5]
In other words, NASA should decide whether to provide education funds to universities, based not on the ability of those universities produce qualified engineers and scientists of any sex but on the number of women in their programs.
Scientists say they have successfully produced a genetically modified mosquito that is unable to carry the malaria parasite. If so, and this mosquito can be bred throughout the mosquito population, it will eradicate malaria entirely.
This analysis of the Senate budget plan that passed the Senate Commerce committee today hits all the most important points. Key quote (in connection with the Senate’s mandate that NASA start over in building a new heavy lift rocket):
Over the last five years, Constellation has cost at least $9 billion and produced little more than one test flight for a stripped-down version of the program’s Ares I rocket. While the Senate plan instructs NASA to salvage parts of Constellation when possible – and provides $11 billion over the next several years — it will take time and resources to create a new design. Adding to the pressure is the 2016 deadline that Congress gives NASA to have the new vehicle ready.
An evening pause: Last night was Judy Garland and Trolley Song. Tonight, how about Galaxy Song from Monty Python? (Thanks to Jeff Wasserman for the tip)
More coverage describing today’s Senate committee vote on the 2011 NASA budget. Interestingly, the Commerce committee and a number of its members have each issued their own press releases. I get the feeling they are trying to convince us they have acomplished something. Here are two from the chairman and ranking member:
More cave news, this time on Earth. Lockheed Martin, under the direction of DARPA, has developed technology capable of mapping underground mines and caves.
NASA scientists report, not surprisingly, that the Earth’s upper atmosphere experienced the largest contraction ever recorded during the recent very deep and prolonged solar minimum.
James Fincannon of NASA has forwarded me two additional pictures of the same cave on the Moon, taken recently at different times by the camera on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and made available by the Goddard Space Flight Center and Arizona State University.
These images clearly show that the skylight looks down into a much larger space, with the underground room belling out from the skylight in all directions. This can be seen by how the angle of sunlight hitting the floor of the cave changes over time. Below is a very crude cartoon I have drawn to illustrate what I think we are seeing in the image on the left. The dashed lines indicate unseen walls whose precise location is not yet determined.
James also forwarded me this link, showing even more images of additional lava tube skylights on the Moon.
Keith Cowing at NASAWatch reports in detail about the unanimous approval of the amended Senate budget for NASA. The final budget appears to have raised the funding for commercial space development to match the Obama request, while adding one more flight to the shuttle schedule and mandating an immediate start of work on some sort of heavy-lift rocket.
Our freedom is under attack, and it isn’t being destroyed by an evil dictator with storm troopers.
This story illustrates nicely why no one should trust the reliablity of any news reporting they see on television or cable. Key quote:
Back in late-1989, I contended that the U.S. economy was in or headed into a deep recession. CNBC had me in to discuss my views along with a senior economist for a large New York bank, who was looking for continued economic growth. Before the show, the bank economist and I shared our views in the Green Room. I outlined my case for a major recession, and, to my shock, his response was, “I think that pretty much is the consensus.” We got on the air, I gave my recession pitch, and he proclaimed a booming economy for the year ahead. He was a good economist and knew what was happening, but he had to put out the story mandated by his employer, or he would not have had a job.
More recently, following an interview on a major cable news network (not CNBC), I was advised off-air by the producer that they were operating under a corporate mandate to give the economic news a positive spin, irrespective of how bad it was.” And now you know that watching stations like CNBC for anything more than just comedic value is hazardous to your health and wealth.
Yesterday Clark Lindsey of rlvnews.com noted that my essay “You’ve got to play the game” appears to “blame the Administration solely for its problems in reforming NASA.” This is not entirely correct. My essay yesterday was specifically intended to lay out the errors and faults of Obama and his administration in their efforts to change NASA. Its purpose was not to discuss the foolishnesses of Congress, the stupidity of which I think everyone is very much aware.
However, Clark is correct when he notes that when it comes to this space war over NASA’s future, Congress is as much at fault as Obama. They are micromanaging NASA’s program in ways that can do little good for the future. Worse, they have shown a greater interest in maintaining pork barrel spending than funding NASA intelligently.
All in all, we have here a complete failure of the political class. I really do hate to sound pessimistic, but for NASA’s near term future, I honestly do not expect positive things to come from the compromise deal that Congress and the President now seem willing to agree to.
Space war over? Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle reports today that there are signs that the White House might agree to the Senate’s budget proposal for NASA, released earlier this week.
The space war over NASA’s future continues. Now 24 former astronauts have written a letter to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), endorsing the idea of allowing the private commercial industry to take over the manned space program of the U.S.
An evening pause: How about some great music tonight, sung by Judy Garland. This is the Trolley Song from Meet Me in St. Louis. The last line of the song says it all, about life and love.
The release of the Senate’s draft language for NASA’s 2011 budget yesterday reveals a great deal about the failures of the Obama administration. Despite months of advocacy by administration officials as well as the upper management of NASA, it appears that the Senate (soon to be followed in a similar manner by the House) is eagerly willing to dismantle much of what the Obama administration is proposing for NASA, and is going to micromanage its own space program.
Why this happened is all very simple: You’ve got to play the game.
If you are going to request major changes to any government program that requires the approval of elected officials beholden to the people in their districts, you have to provide those elected officials some cover for their actions. You simply can’t shutdown these programs willy-nilly without any negotiation and expect members of Congress to go along — even if what you propose is a good idea and makes sense.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Obama administration has done. They have not only shown an astonishing incompetence at playing the political game, they have often acted as if politics is completely irrelevant to their needs, a position that is both stupid and counter-productive considering that Obama is a politician who has to get the agreement of the politicians in Congress. » Read more
Still have doubts whether the climategate investigations were awhitewash? Then read this blistering condemnation by Clive Cook, senior editor at The Atlantic and a global warming advocate.
The third annual Lunar Science Forum is being held July 20-22 at the Ames Research Center in California. The list of papers, some of which are quite intriguing, can be found here. Fun quote from one abstract: “Purity levels of the ice suggest a degree of comingling of ice and regolith grains within the permanently shadowed crater.”
This collection of links gathered by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit illustrates clearly that the Obama administration is in deep trouble, not just on its proposed changes to NASA but on almost every other issue it has tackled. The links also illustrate how incredibly tone deaf this administration continues to be when it comes to politics.
Who is lying? Is it NASA Administrator Bolden or White House spokesman Robert Gibbs? NASA officials continue to insist that Bolden’s claim that foreign outreach is one of NASA’s main tasks is true, despite Gibbs’s denial.
Update: More indications that NASA had planned some sort of outreach to Muslim nations, under White House direction.
An evening pause: Whoever says that the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s only made feel-good films with happy endings has never watched very many of those films. Here’s some stark uncontrolled anger, from one of James Cagney’s best films, White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that all but one of the approximately 3000 incidents of out-of-control acceleration involving Toyota vehicles were because of driver error, not mechanical problems. In other words, the accusations that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Toyota vehicles was false.
