A preliminary cause for the Russian launch failure has been found

Good news: The Russians have pinned down a preliminary cause for the Progress launch failure last week.

Solving this quickly appears essential, as the space station was not really designed to fly unmanned.

Past NASA risk assessments show there is a one in 10 chance of losing the station within six months if astronauts and cosmonauts are not onboard to deal with any critical systems failures. The probability soars to a frightening one in two chance — a 50-percent probability — if the station is left without a crew for a year.

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Power still out

Update: Power finally returned at about 11:50 pm Sunday.

Power is still out here in DC (as of 11:43 pm Sunday), so my posting must remain light.

Why it takes Pepco so long to restore power to our area, and why this seems to happen ever time there is a storm of any kind, remains a very annoying mystery to me.

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Al Gore calls for treating climate skeptics like racists

Al Gore calls climate skepticism the same as racism and calls for treating skeptics the same.

โ€œThere came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with โ€” youโ€™re much younger than me so you didnโ€™t have to go through this personally โ€” but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, โ€˜Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I donโ€™t go for that so donโ€™t talk that way around me. I just donโ€™t believe that.โ€™ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won. We have to win the conversation on climate.โ€

In other words, no expression of skepticism is to be permitted, in any conversation.

I’ll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow.

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