Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
The earthquake moved Japan’s coast eight feet while shifting the Earth’s axis about four inches.
Japan to fill leaking nuke reactor with sea water.
An earthquake update, with images.
The 8.9 earthquake has shut down the Japanese space station mission control center, forcing NASA to take over monitoring Japanese ISS modules.
NASA has concluded that it will cost an additional $30 million to fix the degradation problem on the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific instruments.
Continue budget problems at NASA: Two climate missions each face a one year schedule slip.
Virgin Galactic surpassed $10 million in space tourism sales in 2010.
The kapton tape used on the next Mars rover, Curiosity, releases enough methane of its own that it could mess up the rover’s other science.
No, the “supermoon” didn’t cause the Japanese earthquake.
Does this make you feel safe? The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court it has the authority to routinely strip-search air travelers.
235 years later, the invisible hand still matters.
Hawaii and Pacific islands brace for killer tsunami waves to strike across thousands of miles of ocean.
More here about the situation in Japan.
Video:
Putting ISS to use. Key quote:
Under consideration is using the entire station and its six-person crew as an analog for a deep-space human exploration vehicle en route to Mars. An internal team is studying the feasibility and value of such an exercise in the summer of 2012. “We might start with a small window, like a 30-day window, with actual time delays with what we’d expect with a Martian communications system,” Gerstenmaier says. “We may freeze our consumables on station, in the sense of saying that we’ve started our voyage to Mars, and see how well we do in our predictions.”
Los Angeles community colleges have fired the building program chief who wasted millions on pie-in-the-sky envionmental projects.
A new NPR video from James O’Keefe: This time NPR executives are shown arranging an anonymous donation from the Muslim Brotherhood front group, in direct contradiction to their official claims after the first video was released that “The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.”
There are so many ways this is wrong and illegal I can’t begin to count them: Senators Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) and Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) want to set aside $60 million to develop in-vehicle alcohol detectors that could be installed in all cars. You would have to use it before your car would start.
Putting aside the constitutional issues, isn’t there that federal debt to worry about?
The squealing continues: Senators defend NPR funding. I like this quote in the comments:
What part of being broke do they not understand?
Why public sector unions are losing – and can’t stop it if they tried. Key quote:
This is why the Wisconsin Democratic Senators were in the minority in the first place. There is no reason for ninety percent of the population to rally for benefits that accrue to only ten percent of the workforce when they themselves are cut out of those benefits. So Wisconsin Democrats found themselves a powerless minority, whose only recourse was to run and…hope that tomorrow a new world would dawn. Such hopes are foolishness. And the Wisconsin Republican Senators showed them exactly why that is so. [emphasis in original]
What the academic community must do to bring tolerance of ideas back to colleges: First, recognize the problem.
A Russian military satellite nearly collided with a Korean weather satellite earlier this week.
The new civility from the left: Death threats on Twitter against Scott Walker and the Republicans who support him.
More civility from the left:
Senate Republicans were harried by swarming crowds. “We tried to get out of the building after the vote, because they were rushing the chamber, and we were escorted by security through a tunnel system to another building. But, after being tipped off by a Democrat, they mobbed the exit at that building, and were literally trying to break the windows of the cars we were in as we were driving away,” Republican senator Randy Hopper tells NRO. Such tactics, he sighs, were hardly unexpected. “I got a phone call yesterday saying that we should be executed. I’ve had messages saying that they want to beat me with a billy club.”
The new civility from the left: The Wisconsin Republicans who voted on limiting union collective bargaining have all received a detailed death threat.
We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head.
Read the whole thing. It is quite horrible.
The new civility in Wisconsin: “No one is safe.” In fact, better to read the rest of the quote:
No one is safe. Protesters have broken down doors, broken windows, Democrats are helping them into the building and they’re building momentum. They’re robo-calling like crazy, trying to pack as many people into the capitol so the Assembly can’t vote today. Right now there’s no way the Assembly can vote…we can’t secure the Assembly and we can’t protect our legislators. [emphasis mine]
I don’t seem to remember the tea party protesters doing this kind of stuff when Obamacare was being voted on.
The left’s war on democracy in Wisconsin. Key quote:
Let’s call this what it is: a campaign to nullify the 2010 election, by a sore-loser party that doesn’t like the results.
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupts.
An update on Wisconsin: Legislature passes union bargaining restrictions, violent protests break out. This quote from Walker is interesting:
This afternoon, following a week and a half of line-by-line negotiation, [Democrat] Sen. Miller sent me a letter that offered three options: 1) keep collective bargaining as is with no changes, 2) take our counter-offer, which would keep collective bargaining as is with no changes, 3) or stop talking altogether.
With that letter, I realized that we’re dealing with someone who is stalling indefinitely, and doesn’t have a plan or an intention to return. His idea of compromise is “give me everything I want,” and the only negotiating he’s doing is through the media.
Enough is enough.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have taken new images of the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis in an effort to refine their understanding of its orbital path.
