Potpourri CXVI

The week's pile has gotten thick again, so 'twould best if it were done, that it be done quickly...

Another good find from Tracy on outreach. This article suggests that the problem with outreach isn't with audiences connected to the internet, but with the technologically and educationally underserved. Meanwhile, people who already have access to the web or decent education are likely to already be familiar with the state of space exploration, nanotechnology, or other developments. As Darlene the Science Cheerleader puts it, "the rich get richer." The trick seems to be to reach underserved audiences through nontraditional means.

Here's a slight way to participate in your space program...you can go to this site and select the design for a patch to commemorate the final Space Shuttle launch.

None of us is as dumb as all of us: One of my graphics buddies at NASA pointed out some artwork developed by guys who gathered surveys in several different countries, asking what types of art people liked, what subject matters, what colors, etc...and then also what types of art they didn't like. This is as close as one can get to art by polling data.

From my NASA PAO feed, a notice from Glenn Research Center that there's a competition for high school students to put an experiment on a "BalloonSat."

I got on this mailing list awhile back, and occasionally it comes up with useful stuff. Here's a blog on the effective use of Twitter as a communication/outreach/sales tool. Bottom-line question any organization should answer before jumping into this social networking technology is: "What are you trying to accomplish?" If you can't answer the question coherently, you're just following trends without analysis, and that's a Bad Thing.

I saw this posted by one of my technophile English major buddies, Rudy: it's called SIKULI, and it appears to be a graphic user interface (GUI) of sorts. There's a YouTube attached that speaks ins Programmerese, which is completely unintelligible to me. If it makes sense to you, congratulations. It's supposed to make YOUR life easier. For those of us struggling to remember what we named and how we filed a document, it's a little advanced.

From Douglas Mallette: an article on using carbon nanotubes to make batteries from fabrics. Cool!

The internet is now in space--the International Space Station, that is. What's next?

From Regina, an interesting do-it-yourself experiment in tea bag rocketry (political pundits, keep your nasty comments to yourselves).

From the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE):

• An interesting article from Der Spiegel entitled "The World Bids Farewell to Obama." It's a summary of German perspectives on the Obama administration's future reaction to the Republican taking of the late Senator Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts. I wouldn't count out Mr. Obama just yet. It's not that I'm rooting for him, it's just that anyone who can take down the Clinton machine is not someone to be taken lightly.
• A Financial Times article on the United Nations waiving the first deadline for meeting carbon emissions.
• The Times of London is reporting that a U.N. official is apologizing for saying Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.

The Senate of New York is increasing the amount of legislative information available to the public on the internet.

The OpenNASA folks have a blog about "how little information is available via our agency-wide employee directory." The types of information that interest the writer (Jessy Cowan-Sharp) include "who you are, what you're working on, trades or skills, and side projects." Well, good luck getting anyone over 40 or so to fill in that type of information, my friend. Sometimes it's sensitive/classified, and sometimes the over-55 crowd at NASA doesn't take all that tag cloud stuff seriously, nor do they necessarily want to share the information.

NASA data suggests that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record.

I have some other stuff in my inbox, but I think I'll punt for now. Have a pleasant evening.

Potpourri XXVI

New from Hu, all sorts of articles about the lack of a NASA Administrator:

• [Florida Today] With leader unnamed, clouds shroud NASA
• [Discovery.com] Next Name on NASA Ballot [Lori Garver?]
• [Space Politics] Nelson: someone is _slow walking_ NASA administrator nomination
• [Aviation Week] NASA Budget Being Drafted Without a Top-Level Advocate

And another from Hu on the 1:10 scale Saturn V launch. That's a lot of rocket for a model!

Even Disney, a very PC company (for anyone who worked there), can be accused of not being politically correct enough.

North Korea is now considered a fully fledged nuclear power. So now what?

Happy Debt Day! Apparently it took only until Friday, April 24, for the government's expenditures to exceed its income. I wonder how long any citizen would stay solvent if we lived that way every year.

The bailout saga continues. The government has developed a so-called "stress test," which will use some as-yet-unknown criteria for determining if banks receiving bailout funds are solvent in the long term. If the banks don't pass this test--again, standards unknown--they might qualify for government takeover. If you read the Wall Street Journal, you'll discover that some banks are contesting the stress test and their classification according to said test, mostly because they don't want to be taken over by the government. The government released a white paper giving some rough outlines of what the stress test involves, but not the specific metrics or the banks tested. One would think, in a rational world, that both sets of facts would be revealed, and that said facts would help investors sort out which banks are what, and where to place or remove their money. However, the actual result of the stress test and the way its standards are being released actually increases uncertainty. Expect the Dow to drop or continue its high volatility until the first week in May, when the government releases the actual results and bank names.

YeeeOOWWWW!!! A guy was killed by having 30 nails driven into his skull. That's a lot of anger. And a lot of nails.

The Capitol was temporarily locked down after another private plane accidentally flew into restricted DC airspace.

Nancy Pelosi and a lot of other self-righteous folks in Congress were briefed about the interrogation techniques being used on the Gitmo prisoners as early as 2002. Of course this isn't news. This was public knowledge by at least 2004, but the press is hoping you'll forget. Don't.

Desperate to keep your state's employees in their jobs? Perhaps you should consider accepting some of the prisoners from Club Gitmo. A prison in Montana is open to the idea. No promises of federal help if they escape or convert some of your prisoners to "the cause," though.

My trip to Europe promises to be more and more interesting. Some power plant workers in France cut off the power at their plants in a protest against partial privatization. Guess I'd better bring along a battery-powered alarm clock. There have also been rumblings of civil unrest in Germany because the government is laying off workers to cut costs in the worldwide recession. Oh yeah, and then there's that massive earthquake in Italy. I might get writing ideas on my trip whether I want them or not.

Oh yes, and as a followup to my rant about the possible prosecution of CIA interrogators, the Obama administration plans to release photos of detainees allegedly abused in the interrogation process. It's all fun and enjoyable as long as it's Democrats bashing Bush people for doing this. It'll be more difficult when similar allegations are made against Obama people by Europe or the UN. I hope they have a good answer for that.

Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, which served as the basis for the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, now has his own blog. I'm guessing that whatever he says, it's likely to be smart and worth paying attention to. I have yet to see a better portrayal of humanity's first exploration of the Moon than that TV show.

Some links from Father Dan:

• A car run on compressed air? Maybe.
• A Cato Institute posting on the Supreme Court's decision to allow citizens to bear arms in the District of Columbia. I like Fred Thompson's definition of "strict scrutiny" on Law & Order: "Well, Your Honor, strict scrutiny is like regular scrutiny with a girdle on."
• An extreme approach to bicycling. This guy will probably get a job stunt-riding somewhere.

Looking for an entertaining guest speaker or part-time humorist? May I suggest Dalton Hooper, a former manager of mine from Disney. Dalton belongs to the Mark Twain school of storytelling. He doesn't come right out and tell you things, he sort of meanders into them. He's the sort of Southerner that puts people at ease because he's about as laid-back as they come. The country could use a few more like him.

Welcome to Alabama...7 fans injured at Talladega at the recent NASCAR race. I can't get NASA to go in for "extreme space travel," which is probably just as well.

Okay, Darlene the Science Cheerleader posted this a few days ago, and I wanted a chance to discuss it a little more fully here. The X Prize Foundation is holding an auction on eBay for people to bid on the right to have their entire genome sequenced for the benefit of science. I posted some comments on Dar's site, which as of this writing haven't been cleared yet, so I'll summarize them here. I confessed that this auction hit my decided sweet spot between technophilia and technophobia. Would it bring benefits? Undoubtedly. However, in the age of HIPAA and other major privacy issues, would an individual really want the entire Western World to know what makes him/her tick? What will be done with the information? Who will control it? What happens to the individual if that information is put into "non-scientific" hands? What risks are involved? Look, I am not anti-science. I am pro-caution. This is a huge deal, and the technophiles at X Prize and in the genetic engineering community are so gung-ho to think about what can be done with certain information that they don't stop to ask if it should be done. The Sorceror's Apprentice. Faust. Frankenstein. Jurassic Park. We've already had plenty of myths and warnings in our own culture to know that these questions exist. Are we just choosing to ignore them out of ignorance or hubris?

"Let us redefine progress to say that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do that thing."
--President of the United Federation of Planets, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country