Scientists have figured out how a Venus flytrap (a plant) can shut quickly enough to trap insects.
A “Brilliant Son”
A brilliant son, that is, who ran off a cliff to his death because he feared an “unclean” dog.
One Darwin nominee, coming up.
A “Brilliant Son”
A brilliant son, that is, who ran off a cliff to his death because he feared an “unclean” dog.
One Darwin nominee, coming up.
A “Brilliant Son”
A brilliant son, that is, who ran off a cliff to his death because he feared an “unclean” dog.
One Darwin nominee, coming up.
Dilbert Does The Blogosphere
Not quite as much fun as Debbie Does Dallas, but it’s pretty amusing.
Thirty Eight Years Ago
Today is the first of three grim anniversaries in late January and early February (within a week of each other) of the deaths of American astronauts. On this day in 1967, Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom were incinerated on the launch pad in a ground test of the Apollo capsule.
Jim Oberg has more on these closely-timed anniversaries, in which he makes a compelling case that none of them were “accidents” but that all were avoidable, and that we’ve been lucky that we aren’t commemorating even more astronaut deaths. Here’s what I wrote a year ago (in which I criticized NASA’s reluctance to send a Shuttle to Hubble, a subject on which nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind).
[Update a little after noon]
OK, my dear friend Tim Kyger is whining at me in email that they didn’t die from their burns–they died from asphyxiation. True enough.
I didn’t explicitly say that the burns killed them, but I did imply it, and probably “incineration” is too strong a word for the degree of the burn damage to their bodies. The point remains that they died from a fire (and their deaths, like those of their later colleagues in the Shuttle) were avoidable.
Frightening Thought
How many clueless people are going to respond to this email and install the trojan attached?
Dear Sir/Madam,
We kindly ask you to install this update to your PC as soon as possible.
In the libraries of OS Windows
Rethinking The Chinese Space Program
Glenn has a piece at TCS about it today. He links also to the one I wrote for National Review back in the fall of ought three. In addition, he links to another one that Mark Whittington wrote at The Space Review in the summer of that year. There, Mark wrote:
One interesting point against the idea of a Chinese space threat was made recently by Rand Simberg in his Transterrestrial Musings weblog. He stated,
We Need An Independent Commission
…to investigate the “results” of the “Independent Commission” that investigated Rathergate. It looks like Thornburgh and Boccardi may have set themselves up for a libel suit.
This won’t go away until CBS and its defenders decide to let it all hang out, and display a little honesty. At a minimum, they have to stop making a laughing stock of themselves and admit that that the documents are fake beyond a reasonable doubt. That, plus a very public apology to Matley, might at least make this legal problem go away.
The Religious Left
Joe Katzman has an interesting post on how the “progressive” movement has devolved to ritual.