NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s diplomatic efforts aren’t ending in Saudia Arabia. He will also be heading to China in October.
Update: Bolden is right now in Prague, the Czech Republic, attending the 61st International Astronautical Congress. You can watch some of his remarks during one panel session, posted on SpaceRef.
Among the new images posted last week by the HiRise camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a picture showing the layered and looping ridgelines within Galle Crater. A close-up of these ridgelines revealed the precarious nature of those crumbling cliff tops.
Below is a low resolution version of the image, with a high resolution cropped inset below that, showing a close-up of the most interesting looking area. In the inset you can see that the top of the cliff has separated away. It almost looks as if several large pieces are about to break off. You can also see that the top of the cliff to the north is made up of hanging rocks that appear to almost float in the air. They too look as if they are about to break off.
What makes this even more intriguing is that there are no boulder piles at the bottom of any cliff. All we can see on the valley floor is a pattern of polygonal fractures, possibly “due to ground ice, or regional tectonic stresses.” If large pieces of these ridge lines are breaking off periodically, as they surely appear to be doing, where has the debris gone?
Freedom of speech alert: Rather than criticize the Islamic terrorists who are killing people, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) wants the United Nations to supervise speech in order “to prevent incitement to hatred and discrimination against Muslims and to take effective measures to discourage negative stereotyping of people on the basis of religion, faith or race.”
In yesterday’s elections in Venezuela, things went both good and bad, with the opposition to power-hungry Hugo Chavez winning a majority of votes but barely capturing a third of the seats (62 out of 165) in the new Congress. Key quote:
The government was always likely to get a higher percentage of seats than votes due to changes in electoral districts and voting rules.
Whether these results will slow Chavez’s efforts to make himself dictator remains unclear.
Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic said today that his company is on schedule to begin flying the first tourist flights in eighteen months.
Published today on the astro-ph website, this preprint by Ignacio Ferrín of the Center for Fundamental Physics at the University of the Andes, Merida, Venezuala, is probably the shortest paper I have ever seen. I think that Dr. Ferrin will forgive me if I reprint it here in its entirety:
1. Go to your laboratory or your instrument without any pre-conceived ideas. Just register what you saw faithfully.
2. Report promptly and scientifically. Check your numbers twice before submitting.
3. Forget about predictions. They are maybe wrong.
4. Do not try to conform or find agreement with others. You may be the first to be observing a new phenomenon and you may risk missing credit for the discovery.
5. Criticism must be scientific, respectful, constructive, positive, and unbiased. Otherwise it must be done privately.
6. If you want to be respected, respect others first. Do not use insulting or humiliating words when referring to others. It is not in accord with scientific ethics.
7. Do not cheat. Cheating in science is silly. When others repeat your experiment or observation, they will find that you were wrong.
8. If you do not know or have made a mistake, admit it immediately. You may say, “I do not know but I will find out.” or “I will correct it immediately.” No scientist knows the answer to everything. By admitting it you are being honest about your knowledge and your abilities.
9. Do not appropriate or ignore other people’s work or results. Always give credit to others, however small their contribution may have been. Do not do unto others what you would not like to be done unto you.
10. Do not stray from scientific ethics.
It seems that some scientists in the climate field (Phil Jones of East Anglia University and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University are two that come to mind immediately) would benefit by reading and following these rules.
An evening pause: The stairway to heaven, in Hawaii.
So now that the “global warming” narrative is beginning to fall flat (sorry John Holdren, but I refuse to play your game and call it “global climate disruption”), what do the elite apparachiks worldwide decide to do? They get together in a private meeting in Spain in June to discuss the future threat from global cooling.
What was that? Did I hear you right? Did you say “global cooling?”
Yup. Key quote from the meeting announcement:
The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations. Approximately 130 participants will attend of whom about two-thirds come from Europe and the balance from North America. About one-third is from government and politics, and two-thirds are from finance, industry, labor, education, and communications. The meeting is private in order to encourage frank and open discussion. [emphasis mine]
If it’s not one thing, it’s another. The goal has never been to save the Earth, but to grab power. Now that the public is questioning the reality of the global warming meme, these blowhards have to come up with some other crisis they can use to maintain their positions of power and control. And if it isn’t getting hotter, maybe it’s getting cooler? Never mind the facts or the science, which remains confused and complex. All they want is some justification, no matter how unjustified, for telling everyone else how to live their lives.
One more thought: How much do you want to bet that a good majority of the participants (the full list) flew in on private jets?
James Delingpole of the Telegraph uncovered this little tidbit, and has some blunt but very true words to say about it.
The bad economy since 2008 was only worsened by the Obama stimulus, according to one economist. Key quote:
“Today there is a dependency on people who have never been able to forecast anything,” Taleb said. “What kind of system is insulated from forecasting errors?
The United Nations in charge! They have decided that — should extra-terrestrials ever arrive on Earth — an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist/UN bureaucrat must be in charge of negotiations. In her words:
“We should have in place a co-ordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such co-ordination.”
New details about the Chilean miner rescue.
An evening pause: How about some Loony Tunes silliness: Yankee Doodle Daffy.
