Potpourri CXXVI

I'm in the process of remodeling and adding a lot more content to Rhetoric & Rockets (a.k.a. Bartacus), so if you see more than the usual number of book or product reviews, that is on purpose. I'm trying to see how much money, if any, I can make through my Amazon Affiliate activities. Here's the general premise: if I write a good enough review and you are tempted to buy a book/video/product based on said review, click on the product "badge" on the page, and buy it through Amazon. The writer/creator/producer gets the joy of a customer, and I get a tiny piece of the action as a reviewer.

Another week's worth of stuff to plow through, so my apologies if there isn't a lot of commentary attached. In response to a comment from one reader, I do not read EVERYTHING included in these links, but it would probably terrify you to know how much I do read. Shall we begin?

From Hu: The People's Republic of China is studying a Saturn V-class launch vehicle. There is only one practical purpose for such a rocket, and that is to send human beings to the Moon. What do they know that the Obama administration does not, hmmmm?

From Greg A.: In the spirit of the late Senator William Proxmire and his "Golden Fleece" award, here are the most 10 most absurd scientific papers published in recent memory.

From Tracy: A good article on how space was promoted back when our country believed that exploring space was a Good Thing.

From D2:

• A Big Think video explaining the possible psychological bases of political ideologies. This one gets a "maybe" in my truthiness scale, but it's an intriguing notion.
• Another article that will probably be of interest to Dr. OZMG re: the profit motive and keeping animals in captivity

From Science @ NASA: Some interesting things are happening on the Sun.

From Dar, who is visiting the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference this weekend:

• An article on the future of video games.
• Science has become a serious political issue in the UK (about time it was taken seriously somewhere!).

From Hank Campbell: The Open Source Science Project, a page that encourages private citizens to participate in, and comment upon, research in progress.

How did they get that bug in the museum anyway? A 100-year-old mystery solved. I expect to see a CSI episode about this soon, but it wouldn't be the same without Grissom on the show.


President Obama has called for a space summit in Florida April 15. He'd better have really good briefings/message control, because there are a lot of angry people at Kennedy Space Center. Anyhow, there are several articles about this summit, which NASAWatch has conveniently put all in one place:

• http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/03/florida-space-s.html
• http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/03/space-policy-an.html
• http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/03/daniel-in-the-l.html

Jeff Foust also has a discussion about the summit on his Space Politics blog.

Is the Orion crew exploration vehicle being transferred to the commercial sector? This article says yes.

Some interesting stuff from OpenNASA…
http://www.opennasa.com/2010/03/09/heavenly-answers-for-earthly-problems/
http://www.opennasa.com/2010/03/11/open-participation-not-just-open-information/

Also from Jeff Foust's Space Politics/The Space Review blogs...

• Some progress might be made on making export control rules more rational (i.e. not so tight that American aerospace companies cannot compete overseas).
• An excellent analysis of how the unveiling of the Obama administration's NASA budget was rolled out and why they face challenges getting their way in fiscal year 2011.
• What hope does the U.S. or NASA have for getting international partners for future space missions? Taylor Dinerman says the odds aren't great unless some serious structural changes are made. This is easily fixed, by the way. The Department of Defense is able to obtain "five-year" funds to build things like aircraft carriers without having to debate the whole thing every year.

Florida members of Congress are trying to keep the Shuttle flying longer.

Machines capable of reading thoughts? Maybe.


Here's an article on the fact that Twitter knows where you are tweeting from. But really, anyone familiar with the technology already knew this…

Like most large, bureaucratic organizations, the Department of Defense has a love-hate relationship with social media web sites.

This is kind of cool: a Flash feature showing the process/progress of assembling the International Space Station (ISS). Just a gentle reminder, all: there are only four more Space Shuttle missions planned, and once they're done and, if the President gets his way, the Constellation Program, NASA will NOT have a rocket that can fly up to ISS until 2016 at the earliest, leaving us dependent on the Russians to get our astronauts there. If you want to know why, I suggest calling your elected officials and demanding an answer. I already KNOW the answer, but I'm not going to share that. It's more fun for you to call and ask. Trust me.

From Martin: A Russian-language travelogue through a "boomer" (nuclear missile submarine) base. I'd be interested to know if this sub is considered "active," or if it's been retired. If it's been retired, has all the hot stuff--the ship's nuclear reactor and its missiles--been removed? Russian speakers are welcome to enlighten me.

The Echoes of Apollo group is interested in building or enhancing the Deep Space Network, which is a worldwide set of dish antennas used to collect data from satellites and vehicles farther in space. Gosh knows the U.S. system could use an upgrade or two.

From Regina: The European Space Agency (ESA) has upgraded its "Eduspace" web page for space education.

From Father Dan: A very cool map of weather conditions at every airport in the U.S.

From Lin: A new bicycle from New Zealand, the "Yike Bike."

And that will do for now. Your readership and patronage are appreciated!

Potpourri CII

Working on clearing my inbox while I do laundry and pack for Europe. One week to go. HOO-wah!

This is important and disturbing, so it's moving to the top of the pile: aides to Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) are drafting legislation that would give the president power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet during a "cybersecurity emergency," whatever the heck that is. An amazing amount of commerce is performed via internet. If this bill passed, a large segment of the population and the private sector might find itself unable to conduct busines or communicate electronically. How's that hope and change working out for ya?

The first image of a complete molecule has been captured. Amazing!

Don't try this at home or on safari!

More from the animal kingdom...painting elephants. I can't help wondering if these elephant artists have started smoking and complaining about how the bourgeois tourists don't understand how they suffer...

Mahmoud Ahmadenijad wants to prosecute his political opponents in the recent Iranian election for stirring up trouble (e.g. daring to question him)...you know: kinda like prosecuting Bush administration officials after the last election.

From @skytland, a panel summary from "South by Southwest" (a.k.a. SXSW), one of the largest new media events in the country. The panel topic? "Moon 2.0," which is to say, participatory space exploration of the moon. My buddy Doc might be going to this event. I'll get my media fixes vicariously through him.

Someone else is looking to build a space hotel. I've got to confess: the more I think about the effects of weightlessness, the more I think staying the heck here sounds like a great idea. Is it heresy for a space advocate to say that? Probably, but there ya go. Happy to have the opportunity to go, but really, I've got laundry to do. Or something.

CNN is reporting that some sectors of the economy are reviving themselves without government assistance. You know: that whole "invisible hand" thing that some of my liberal friends don't trust or don't believe exists. My question is: if that's the case, can we stop with the bailouts already and not spend the rest of that trillion-dollar "stimulus?" As Father Dan puts it to me when I ask silly rhetorical questions, "Get a grip!" The stimulus isn't about stimulating the economy. We already had proof when Bush did it that government stimulus spending does not work, and that was $700 billion worth. Then Obama doubled down with over a trillion. So the answer to my question is, yes, we can stop with the bailouts, but we won't because President Obama has a different agenda in mind. So here's the game plan:

1. Jack up government spending to show that he's "doing something."
2. Admit after the fact that the deficit is too high.
3. Raise taxes to pay down the deficit, which is what Obama wanted to do in the first place because he's a strict redistributionist.

As usual with government-centered attempts to redistribute wealth in an economy, this plan will fail because rich people will either move out of the country, stop working, or eventually run out of money. Once that happens, he goes after the middle class and raises their taxes so that their money can be used to "make things more fair." And when there are no more rich people or middle class (except, of course, the government officials dispensing this "social justice"), well then we'll all be equal...in our misery. How's that hope and change working out for ya?

Michael Vick played his first game in Philadelphia and got a standing ovation from the fans. Which more or less proves what I was grousing about when he first got his gig with the Eagles: social stigma and bad publicity don't have any force anymore. Shame on them and shame on us when all that matters is victory without considering the character of those achieving it. If the fans in Philly don't have any shame about hiring this thug, will the fans of the teams playing against the Eagles reject Vick and not show up for the games? To repeat Father Dan's comment, "Get a grip!"

Laundry is still in progress, but I'm done clearing out the inbox. Never mind my grumpiness, have a great day!

Potpourri V

Here's a roundup of the sections of the internet where I prowl:

• Ray Kurzweil finally responded to the Singularity questions sent by Darlene the Science Cheerleader, me, and our readers. We'll have those answers dual-posted on Science Cheerleader and Rhetoric & Rockets Thursday, when Darlene gets back from South by Southwest (SXSW). Darlene is on a panel titled, "Back Off, Man. I'm a Scientist," which will be discussing "user-generated discovery." That should be interesting.
• Darlene has posted cheers developed by the Philadelphia 76ers cheerleading squad on the 18 concepts people should know for science literacy. Did I mention that Dar rocks?!?
• The new Star Trek trailer is worth a look.
• Some interesting reading from the American Enterprise Institute by Charles Murray and Irving Kristol, as well as commentary by Jerry Pournelle.
• The Space Shuttle finally launched, and I missed it. Shame on me. Of course the more I learn about these things and what sorts of things can go wrong, the more nerve-wracking they become.
• Matt Labash has another interesting bit in The Weekly Standard, this time on my latest e-addiction, Facebook. Suffice to say, Mr. Labash is not a fan.

*

I've been having a rather long discussion at work about newspapers and their imminent demise at the hands of the internet and talk radio. My buddy Martin keeps trying to sell me on the glories and greatness and Almighty Traditions of Impartial Reporting, which the Internet is Going to Destroy. First of all, that "tradition" can be (and has been) easily exposed as anything but impartial. However, even if I accept his first premise, I still believe that objective journalism and thoughtful analysis and commentary can be found on the Internet. The problem (and Martin is right about this) is that people are not particularly interested in reading "objective" accounts of anything anymore, or they don't believe such things exist. You can thank postmodernism for that.

Obi-wan Kenobi: "That's the truth!"
Qui-gon Jinn: "From your point of view." --Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

While I won't mourn many of the local papers I've read in my lifetime, the capitalist in me still wants to know from the net-heads how they expect writers who develop content to make money. My buddy Doc has pointed out that writers like John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow manage to keep selling books even though they give them away on their web sites. Great. What will they do to make a buck when the dead-tree option is no longer available to them?

However, if I understand the problem correctly from Martin and Tracy, who are both former reporters, there are not enough advertising revenues to support high-powered staffs of eminent writers used to serious money (proof enough to my hard-core Republican friends that liberals, too, are capitalists). On the flip side, I might argue that the ethos or credibility of certain reporters could easily transfer to new forms of media. Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, et al., manage to write the same quality of English for WashingtonPost.com that they do for the version that comes from dead trees. But seriously, can't these folks write books (electronic or otherwise) to make a buck? The problem is crystallized by a guy I went to grad school with. He was an early adopter of the Internet, Linux, open sourcing, etc., and his big thing was that "The internet should be free, man." To which I still say, "Fine, dude. But how are you gonna pay for all your hardware?" Blank stare.

I don't expect Tracy, Martin, Doc, or me to solve the Demise of the Newspapers or the broken internet business model, but it beats the usual yakkity-yak water cooler talk about SEC football, doesn't it?