Potpourri XXV

Topics are getting what Jerry Pournelle would call "short shrift" this evening because my brain is just fried. Nothing burns me out faster than unproductive meetings.

First, one forwarded from Darlene the Science Cheerleader. For those of you interested in making government more collaborative, there's the Open Government & Innovations Conference, which will be July 21-22 in Washington.

A link from Tim Bailey, the current ISDC chairman: Scaled Composites has decided to respond to press reports about their flight tests of White Knight Two because they are sufficiently inaccurate to warrant comment.

Miss California(!) made the mistake of telling a Hollyweird person that she felt marriage should be between a man and a woman. Law & Order actress and former model Angie Harmon is standing up for her. Ms. Harmon has been taking some heat for being "racist" because she has dared to disagree with some of President Obama's policies. There's not enough money to move me back to "blue state America."

New from Hu: NASA's deadline of returning to the Moon by 2020 might be in jeopardy. Don't even get me started.

The Politico.com has an insightful look at what the Obama administration wants you to hear/think about "the first 100 days," which is only a big deal because Obama's hero and late mentor FDR made a big deal of his first 100 days.

Now this is interesting: the Space Frontier Foundation is offering a $5,000 prize for a space business plan.

Andrew Klavan has a snarky explanation of liberals' responses to conservative rhetoric. The short version is "Shut up."

Item from Tracy...a literature map that shows what other books readers of particular authors are reading. I've seen this site before, and it's fun. However, my biggest gripe with it is that there are some duplicate entries because the people feeding the map engine's database have occasionally misspelled authors' names. Thus you might have "Arthur C. Clarke," "Arthur Clarke," and "Arthur Clark" all on one page, when they're the same man. If someone likes an author well enough to read his work, wouldn't you think they'd take the time to get the spelling of his name right? Just askin'.

That's it for now. I've got another rant, which I'll throw out under its own posting. I didn't sleep well last night because I was surfing/blogging well past my usual crash time, so I'm going to make sure I get the requisite 8 hours this evening, or I will be a cranky dude tomorrow. Hasta lambada.