Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Yesterday’s spacewalk on ISS, though successful, was cut short because of spacesuit discomfort issues unrelated to the earlier water leak problems.

9:11 am

Yesterday’s spacewalk on ISS, though successful, was cut short because of spacesuit discomfort issues unrelated to the earlier water leak problems.

No story on the spacewalk is entirely clear on the issues. Astronaut Rick Mastracchio was cold, but it seems he also had other problems that have not been outlined clearly. Interestingly he was not using the spacesuit that flooded in July. Michael Hopkins was using that suit and apparently had no problems.

In order to resize the spare suit on the station for Mastracchio they have delayed the next spacesuit for one day.

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The top ten states for job growth.

6:08 pm

The top ten states for job growth.

There isn’t a clear common political thread here, but it is worth noting that all of the top five and seven of the ten have all-Republican governments.

It isn’t the party that matters, it is the philosophy of the members of that party that matters. And you are more likely to find politicians who support freedom, competition, and capitalism in the Republican Party.

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It seems Curiosity’s wheels are wearing out faster than expected and engineers want to know why.

5:45 pm

It seems Curiosity’s wheels are wearing out faster than expected and engineers want to know why.

The increasedwear recently appears to be because the rover was traveling over rougher terrain. Nonetheless, JPL engineers are going to monitor the rover’s travel and wheel damage more closely in order to gauge that wear better for future travel.

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Scientists admit that second-hand smoke causes zero cancer deaths.

9:51 am

Scientists admit that second-hand smoke causes zero cancer deaths.

The article notes that this fact has been known for years.

Jyoti Patel, MD, of Northwestern University School of Medicine said the findings were not new. … “Passive smoking has many downstream health effects—asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disease—but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer,” said Patel. “The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is a norm.”

In other words, the power hungry who have been imposing these regulations on us have been lying about why they want to do it. They aren’t protecting anyone, they are simply trying to impose their will. And succeeding.

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Advice for Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty.

10:23 pm

I posted this Andrew Klavan commentary back in January 2011, shortly after the Tucson shooting when the left was accusing the right of causing the shooting because of the so-called “incivility” of their speech. It was all lies, merely intended to stifle the speech of anyone who dissented from liberal orthodoxy.

I think it bears viewing again, as it provides good advice and council to Phil Robertson and the entire Duck Dynasty family. It also once again outlines quite starkly how oppressive and fascist the American left has become.

As Klavan concludes, “Whatever you do, don’t shut up.”

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The Obama administration has announced another eleventh-hour exemption to Obamacare.

9:35 pm

Chaos: The Obama administration has announced another exemption to Obamacare.

The Obama administration, in an 11th-hour change just before the holiday break, announced a major exemption in ObamaCare that will let people who lost coverage and are struggling to get a new plan sign up for bare-bones policies. The move Thursday to allow potentially hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for “catastrophic” coverage plans was blasted by the insurance industry as a shift that would cause “tremendous instability.”

I thought these “bare-bone” policies were “garbage plans” that only a few weeks ago Democrats were telling us we should be happy were cancelled.

It also appears from the above article as well as other sources that the insurance companies are very hostile to this announcement. (Read the second link especially. It outlines the many problems this new ad-hoc exemption causes.)

In a word, this law doesn’t work, it never has, and it should be repealed now.

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Under Seattle Bertha has stopped drilling because something is in the way.

9:27 pm

Under Seattle Bertha has stopped drilling because something is in the way.

Something unknown, engineers say — and all the more intriguing to many residents for being unknown — has blocked the progress of the biggest-diameter tunnel-boring machine in use on the planet, a high-tech, largely automated wonder called Bertha. At five stories high with a crew of 20, the cigar-shaped behemoth was grinding away underground on a two-mile-long, $3.1 billion highway tunnel under the city’s waterfront on Dec. 6 when it encountered something in its path that managers still simply refer to as “the object.”

The object’s composition and provenance remain unknown almost two weeks after first contact because in a state-of-the-art tunneling machine, as it turns out, you can’t exactly poke your head out the window and look.

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WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, sent back its first images in almost three years this week.

5:57 pm

Back from the dead: WISE sent back its first images in almost three years this week.

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, or NEOWISE, has taken its first set of test images since being reactivated in September after a 31-month-long hibernation, NASA officials announced today (Dec. 19). The space agency wants NEOWISE to resume its hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids, some of which could be promising targets for future human exploration.

We should note that NASA had shut down this functional space telescope even though the cost to use it to hunt asteroids would be relatively little. Cost was cited as the reason, but I suspect it was a combination of the vast overruns for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Obama administration’s puzzling hostility to science at NASA.

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