Potpourri LIV

Despite a week away from the home computer, I found little that required my readers' attention. Be grateful: I probably had a few hundred emails to sift through. Still, I thought I would share the following. Enjoy.

News from Hu:

• The Augustine Human Space Flight panel is coming to Huntsville/Decatur to visit Marshall Space Flight Center (the Ares Projects) and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) plant to check out the Delta/Atlas production lines. The visit is making life at MSFC very exciting, to say the least. Fortunately, I missed most of The Swirl (as I call it) because I was on travel.
• The $400M budget cut to Constellation is still in NASA's 2010 budget.

From Lin, who has a new web site:

• The American Thinker opinion site has an article on fusion. I love the notion of fusion power. Unfortunately, like space solar power, it's always been "just 20 years away." And we've been working on fusion for something like 50 years, SSP for 40.
• Another American Thinker editorial on gun control in India.
• A new hydrogen-electric car developed in an "open-source" fashion. Fascinating, but tiny. It'll get you places, and maybe a friend, but don't plan on taking anything with you.
• An obituary for Common Sense. I'd better tell my mom. She'll be all kinds of upset.

From Melissa, a video of a guy with seriously scary acrobatic skills.

From my Google news feed, a couple stories on Ares I-X:

• NASAWatch: Ares Struggles Ahead with Ares 1-X [sic] Launch.
• NASAOrbit: NASA Prepares to Assemble Ares I-X Rocket.

From Yohon: a service called eScrip, that allows you to automatically donate 5% of your total restaurant bill to a community group.

And while I've been out of the loop on the news, it's been hard to ignore the massive protests going on in Iran. The Obama administration has wisely kept their nose out of it, for the most part. Maybe someday the U.S. will relearn the value of John Adams' dictum that "We are friends of liberty everywhere, but guardians only of our own." I wish the lovers of freedom well, but hope, if they succeed in unseating the tyranny in their country, that they will back off the virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Israel stances that have characterized Mahmoud Ahmadenijad.

That's it for now.