Orwell would be proud: India is in the process of biometrically identifying every one of it 1.2 billion citizens.
Turn, turn, turn: Cassini has now seen the beginnings of a vortex over Titan’s south pole, the first sign that winter is coming to the planet’s southern hemisphere.
The modern Democratic Party: The Democratic candidate for Secretary of State of Missouri claims that no Jews were killed on 9/11, while also suggesting that Jews were involved in the attack itself.
“Why [was] 9/11 was a official holiday for all Jewish people who worked in the the WTC?” Alam said in a discussion titled, “Was 9/11 a conspiracy??”
Asked earlier this week about this statement, Alam reaffirmed his position. “My question was, ‘What’s the reason not a single Jew was killed on that day,’” Alam said, according to the Washington Free Beacon. “Was there a single Jew killed on that day?”
Gee, I wonder what he would say to these people?
An indoor climbing wall that never ends.
This is good: The number of Democrats in the House willing to join the Republicans to vote for repeal of Obamacare appears to be growing.
The uncertainty of science: The glaciers of the Karakoram Range in the Himalayas are not shrinking as predicted, according to satellite data.
The rise and fall of Germany’s solar power industry.
A campaign by scientists in England to reform that country’s libel laws.
The Russian company building that country’s Glonass GPS system is under investigation by the police for the embezzlement of more than a half billion rubles.
A student experiment — successfully flown up and down to ISS by Dragon — is apparently a failure because no one on ISS ever turned it on.
Per instructions from NanoRacks, the Houston company that works with NASA to integrate such deliveries, Warren packed his worms, or C. elegans, into a glass ampule, or tube, then packed that tube into a larger one containing a liquid “growth medium” for the worms. An astronaut aboard the space station was to crack the outer ampule in a way that would release the worms into the surrounding liquid. It never happened.
The article is very diplomatic about this, but it is very clear that either the astronauts on ISS screwed up, or NASA did by not giving them clear instructions.
Repeal the damn thing! A survey of doctors nationwide has found that 83% have considered abandoning the practice of medicine due to Obamacare.
Saturn from above: Cassini has shifted its orbit so that it can look down on Saturn and its rings.
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. As I do every month, I am posting this graph, which you can see below the fold.
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The religion of peace: “Christianity should be destroyed and wiped from the face of the earth.”
New research suggests that — despite its known bad effects — weightlessness might actually slow the aging process.
Don’t jump into that spaceship yet! The research was done on worms, and is to put it mildly very preliminary. Moreover, none of the results change anything regarding the serious loss of bone density and the weakening of the muscles and cardiovascular system caused by weightlessness.
The uncertainty of science: New research has apparently disproven the Mono Lake research that suggested that arsenic might replace phosphorus as one of the basic building blocks of life.
The National Park Service is proposing the removal of several historic bridges in Yosemite because they interfere with water flow, according to environmentalists.
Look, why don’t they simply admit it: They really want don’t want any humans to visit these parks, and simply outlaw them all? That way, the job of the National Park Service will be so much easier: They — and their environmentalist buddies — will finally have the park to themselves to play in without being bothered by all those disgusting American citizens.
Cool images of the opening of the floodgates of a Chinese dam.
The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limiting the agency’s regulatory powers.
That would make the 2013 EPA budget equivalent to its budget in the early 2000s, numbers that would hardly be crippling.
For a second year in a row the U.S. has negotiated a deal with a Russian company to provide icebreaker service to Antarctica during the winter.
The company had played hardball in negotiations, so I expect the National Science Foundation is paying a lot more this year than last for the service.
An evening pause: Clearly a terrorist by the modern standards of Homeland Security.
This is freedom? A Phoenix man has been jailed for holding private Bible study sessions in his own home.
Salman is the owner of Mighty Mike’s Burgers — and he is also an ordained pastor. He and his wife have been hosting Bible studies on their 4.6 acre property since 2005. The gatherings were originally attended by as many as 15 people.
Wow! As many as fifteen people! The mind boggles. Just imagine the traffic problems these mobs must have caused, especially as they gathered on a plot of land as small as 4.6 acres!
I say “Please!” and I say it loudly. Picking Ryan for number two would reverse Ronald Reagan’s biggest mistake, picking moderate George Bush Sr. as his VP. The result of that bad choice was 12 years of Bush rule in the late 1980s and in the 2000s, during which there was little effort to rein in the power or size of government. In fact, the Bushes did a lot to increase government’s power and size.
Picking Ryan as VP would place a competent fiscal conservative into the limelight and make such a person a leading contender for the Presidency in future years. It would also help demonstrate again that the 2010 election was a trend, not a fluke.
Is the U.S. government reading your emails without a warrant? The answer appear to be “Maybe.”
And the stance of the Obama administration?
The Justice Department and the Obama administration had a chance to settle the issue in April 2011, during a Senate hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Instead, officials with both the Commerce and Justice departments failed to provide any clarity. Instead, a Justice Department official argued against extending Fourth Amendment protections — specifically strict warrant requirements — to email, saying that doing so would hinder investigations. “Congress should consider carefully the adverse impact on criminal as well as national security investigations if a probable-cause warrant were the only means to obtain such stored communications,” James Baker, associate deputy attorney general, testified at the hearing.
This behavior is not only immoral it is constitutionally illegal. It should stop.
