Stealth unionization. “Many day care providers didn’t even know they were in the union until notified after the vote had concluded.”
The future of Obamacare: bureaucracy and pulling strings.
This is horrible: It appears that the man who killed two American soldiers in Frankfort was partly motivated by watching clips taken from one of Hollywood’s numerous anti-Iraq war films.
The tiger stripe fissures on Saturn’s moon Enceladus have turned out to be far hotter than predicted.
Want to know what’s inside X-37b? New Scientist dug around in the patent office and got some clues. Key quote:
Boeing reveals in the patent that the solar array has been designed to permit fast folding and stowing. The reason? So the X-37B can fold the solar array away, fire its thrusters and change its orbit to confound adversaries. This would be useful for satellites, too, says Boeing: “The ability to completely re-stow would offer mission flexibility to move the satellite thus making its orbit unpredictable.”
The scientific battle over the meteorite fossil paper continues.
Does this seem as crazy to you as it does to me? At the same time the Obama administration is fighting to prevent any new drilling for oil, it is also now considering tapping our strategic oil reserve to get more oil into the market.
Discovery has undocked from ISS, for the last time.
Planetary scientists make their recommendations for the kinds of planetary missions they think the United States should do for the next decade. And it looks like a lean future, as the scientists also note that their primary recommendations, missions to Mars and Europa, should only be built if their budgets can be trimmed significantly:
NASA’s top priority, according to the survey’s recommendations, should be the Mars Astrobiology Explorer Cacher, or MAX-C, which could help determine whether Mars ever supported life and offer insight on its geologic and climate history. It would also be the first step in an effort to get samples from Mars back to Earth. However, the report said this mission should only be undertaken if NASA’s cost is about $2.5 billion, which is $1 billion less than independent estimates provided to the panel. The mission would be run jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, according to the survey.
A mission to Europa and its subsurface ocean — which might support life — should be the second priority mission, the experts said. But its estimated price tag of $4.7 billion may make it too expensive without an increase in NASA’s planetary science budget or a paring of the mission’s costs. [emphasis mine]
The new Senate budget proposal for NASA cuts the agency’s budget, though it does so less than the House.
Only a few months ago the Democratically-controlled Senate proposed giving NASA an increase from its 2010 budget. Today, the Senate, still controlled by Democrats, now proposes cutting that budget instead. It is remarkable to watch the impact of an election.
Richard Kerr of Science is attending the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, and has written a short article describing the reaction of planetary scientists to the meteorite fossil paper by NASA scientist Richard Hoover. Their reaction, hostile and disinterested, isn’t pretty. These two quotes will give you the flavor:
Whether they have closely examined the paper by astrobiologist Richard Hoover of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center or only heard about it in the hallways, the reaction is the same: not again.
Rather than taking a look themselves, researchers have other things in mind. One leading scientist half-jokingly suggested hanging Hoover in effigy in the conference center lobby.
An evening pause: Anna Russell, in one of her last concerts, explains Wagner’s Ring cycle. You can see parts 2 and 3 of the entire comedy routine here and here. Trust me, it is worth watching all three parts, even if you know nothing about opera.
A Jewish student has sued the University of California Berkeley for not protecting her against harassment and violence. Key quote:
The complaint alleges that the Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association, another pro-Palestinian group on campus, harass and attack Jewish students, and that the university knows about it and has not taken sufficient steps to protect its Jewish students. The complaint further charges that university officials have tolerated “the growing cancer of a dangerous anti-Semitic climate on its campuses” that violates the rights of Jewish and other students “to enjoy a peaceful campus environment free from threats and intimidation.”
In an unusual move, NASA has issued a statement on the alien fossil paper written by Richard Hoover. Key quote:
While we value the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry, NASA cannot stand behind or support a scientific claim unless it has been peer-reviewed or thoroughly examined by other qualified experts. This paper was submitted in 2007 to the International Journal of Astrobiology. However, the peer review process was not completed for that submission. NASA also was unaware of the recent submission of the paper to the Journal of Cosmology or of the paper’s subsequent publication.
This suggests that Hoover was having trouble getting published in one journal, and did an end-around to get published in a journal more agreeable to his conclusions.
Though this does raise questions about the validity of the research, it is always the research itself that matters. In this case I remain skeptical, but intrigued. I really would like to know why the peer-review process on Hoover’s paper was taking so long at the International Journal of Astrobiology. I would also love to read a critique of Hoover’s papers from scientists in the field.
Maybe the airlines should consider this option: The Amtrak police chief has barred the TSA from the railroad’s security operations.
[Police chief] O’Connor said the TSA VIPR teams have no right to do more than what Amtrak police do occasionally, which has produced few if any protests and which O’Connor said is clearly within the law and the Constitution. More than a thousand times, Amtrak teams (sometimes including VIPR) have performed security screenings at Amtrak stations. These screenings are only occasional and random, and inspect the bags of only about one in 10 passengers. There is no wanding of passengers and no sterile area. O’Connor said the TSA violated every one of these rules.
O joy. The federal government posted its biggest monthly deficit ever in February 2011.
The new civility: Sarah Palin’s parents describe the numerous death threats the family has received.
Progress! The Senate’s science budget proposals are higher than the House’s, but actually do include real cuts.
Want to run against an entrenched liberal Democrat? Then expect him and his allies to try to destroy your children.
Progress! Two senators from both parties have proposed an anti-appropriations committee that would focus on cutting wasteful federal programs.
If Obamacare was so great, why have the number of waivers the administration has issued to the law now climbed to more than 1,000?
Alabama lawmakers express desire to protect funding of Huntsville NASA facilities.
Normally I would call this a typical squeal for funds (and we do see so-called conservative Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) squealing a bit) , but the article makes it clear that everyone involved (even the journalist!) has real doubts about the wisdom of funding these programs with the present federal debt.
Clark Lindsey of www.rlvnews.com/ has posted some interesting thoughts in reaction to the successful launch of the Air Force’s second reusable X-37b yesterday and how this relates to NASA’s budget battles in Congress. Key quote for me:
Charles Bolden doesn’t seem prepared to make a forceful case against the clear and obvious dumbness of the HLV/Orion program. Perhaps he in fact wants a make-work project for NASA to sustain the employee base.
As I’ve said before, the program-formerly-called-Constellation is nothing more than pork, and will never get built. Why waste any money on it now?
How the head of Los Angeles’s community college construction program wasted millions on green energy construction. This quote sums up the absurdity of this environmental wet dream:
As head of a $5.7-billion, taxpayer-funded program to rebuild the college campuses, Eisenberg commanded attention. But his plan for energy independence was seriously flawed. He overestimated how much power the colleges could generate. He underestimated the cost. And he poured millions of dollars into designs for projects that proved so impractical or unpopular they were never built. These and other blunders cost nearly $10 million that could have paid for new classrooms, laboratories and other college facilities, a Times investigation found.
The problems with Eisenberg’s energy vision were fundamental. For starters, there simply wasn’t room on the campuses for all the generating equipment required to become self-sufficient. Some of the colleges wouldn’t come close to that goal even if solar panels, wind turbines and other devices were wedged into every available space.
Going off the grid did not make economic sense either. Given the cost of alternative energy technology, it would be more expensive for the district to generate all its own electricity than to continue paying utilities for power.
Weather and geology also refused to cooperate. Three solar power arrays had to be scrapped because the intended locations were atop seismic faults. Plans for large-scale wind power collided with the reality that prevailing winds at nearly all the campuses are too weak to generate much electricity. To date, a single wind turbine has been installed, as a demonstration project. It spins too slowly in average winds to power a 60-watt light bulb. [emphasis mine]
Worse, the man who forced this idiocy on the colleges still sees nothing wrong with it. And his justification illustrates how completely uneducated he is.
He cast himself as an environmental visionary and predicted that the college system would eventually achieve energy independence. “Somebody needs to be first,” he said. “If the great explorers really had a map and knew where they were going, maybe we wouldn’t have the result we have today.
The fact is that the great explorers always had a map, and worked carefully from real data. Granted, the horizon was unknown, but the explorers who succeeded all ground their exploration on reality, not fantasy.
With foolish leadership like this, it is no surprise California is about to go bankrupt.
Shackleton’s Antarctica, in color in 1915.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA spent millions developing the ability to do secret body scans of pedestrians as they entered train stations, bus depots or major events. Key quote:
EPIC lawyer Ginger McCall says the project is disturbing nonetheless because it shows the department “obviously believed that this level of surveillance is acceptable when in fact it is not at all acceptable.”
