On Friday, I threatened to write a review of the year in space. Jeff Foust has preempted me this morning, over at The Space Review, and it’s unlikely I’ll do any better.
Lots of other good stuff over there as well, with items on Bigelow, and a well-deserved slapdown of Alex “Eeyore” Roland by Dwayne Day.
The GAO has released a report on Hubble servicing costs:
At our request, NASA prepared an estimate of the funding needed for a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble. NASA estimates the cost at between $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion. However, documentary support for portions of the estimate is insufficient.
What a surprise.
NASA, an agency that has already internally decided that it isn’t going to use Shuttle to save the Hubble, comes up with an outrageously high cost number to do so in order to help justify its decision, but doesn’t substantiate it.
This number is simply incredible. I’ll bet they’re using a cost per flight of between half a billion and a billion dollars (which is the average cost, but isn’t the appropriate number to use when estimating the mission cost, which should be the marginal cost–between one hundred and two hundred million). I’ll also bet that they’re including the cost of Hubble replacement hardware that has already been built and paid for. I’ll also bet that getting the basis for this “estimate” from NASA will be like pulling teeth from an unanaesthetized elephant on crank.
The only costs that need to be compared are the cost of developing the robotics necessary to do this mission without Shuttle (already estimated to be hundreds of millions, if not over a billion), the cost of any modifications necessary to allow the equipment originally designed to be serviced by astronauts to be instead replaced by the aforesaid “robot” (which is really not a robot, but a teloperator, and which will up costs even more), to the cost of launching another Shuttle mission, training the crew, and using the equipment already designed and built to do so. I would truly be shocked if any honest analysis would indicate that the Shuttle mission isn’t the cheapest way to go.
[Via NASA Watch]
The New York Times has a story about the explosive growth of Firefox, and how Redmond’s screwed, at least in the short term. There may be only one way out, as Scott Ott amusingly points out.
But another article says that Thunderbird, its email client companion, won’t be able to make as many inroads against Outlook, no matter how insecurity-ridden that program is, because of the energy barrier necessary to change email clients.
Email and Usenet are the biggest things keeping me from switching to Linux for my desktop–I just have too much legacy data in Eudora and Agent, and no obvious way to transition over to things like Thunderbird and Pan. I use Mozilla for browsing, but I’m still using Eudora and Agent, until there’s an open-source solution for this problem.
The New York Times has a story about the explosive growth of Firefox, and how Redmond’s screwed, at least in the short term. There may be only one way out, as Scott Ott amusingly points out.
But another article says that Thunderbird, its email client companion, won’t be able to make as many inroads against Outlook, no matter how insecurity-ridden that program is, because of the energy barrier necessary to change email clients.
Email and Usenet are the biggest things keeping me from switching to Linux for my desktop–I just have too much legacy data in Eudora and Agent, and no obvious way to transition over to things like Thunderbird and Pan. I use Mozilla for browsing, but I’m still using Eudora and Agent, until there’s an open-source solution for this problem.
The New York Times has a story about the explosive growth of Firefox, and how Redmond’s screwed, at least in the short term. There may be only one way out, as Scott Ott amusingly points out.
But another article says that Thunderbird, its email client companion, won’t be able to make as many inroads against Outlook, no matter how insecurity-ridden that program is, because of the energy barrier necessary to change email clients.
Email and Usenet are the biggest things keeping me from switching to Linux for my desktop–I just have too much legacy data in Eudora and Agent, and no obvious way to transition over to things like Thunderbird and Pan. I use Mozilla for browsing, but I’m still using Eudora and Agent, until there’s an open-source solution for this problem.
Americans are still welcome in Bastogne.
“The American veterans who have returned 60 years later to the battle site represent those who gave their lives on our soil so that today we can live free,” Bastogne Mayor Philippe Collard said in French at a memorial honoring U.S. General George S. Patton.
He added in English: “We will never forget. You are home here.”
I fervently hope that, to the degree that they do so now, the French can continue to live free, in the face of the new totalitarian threat in their midst to which they are only now awakening. They, and much of western Europe, are now on one of the front lines of the new war, whether they realize it or not.
Americans are still welcome in Bastogne.
“The American veterans who have returned 60 years later to the battle site represent those who gave their lives on our soil so that today we can live free,” Bastogne Mayor Philippe Collard said in French at a memorial honoring U.S. General George S. Patton.
He added in English: “We will never forget. You are home here.”
I fervently hope that, to the degree that they do so now, the French can continue to live free, in the face of the new totalitarian threat in their midst to which they are only now awakening. They, and much of western Europe, are now on one of the front lines of the new war, whether they realize it or not.
Americans are still welcome in Bastogne.
“The American veterans who have returned 60 years later to the battle site represent those who gave their lives on our soil so that today we can live free,” Bastogne Mayor Philippe Collard said in French at a memorial honoring U.S. General George S. Patton.
He added in English: “We will never forget. You are home here.”
I fervently hope that, to the degree that they do so now, the French can continue to live free, in the face of the new totalitarian threat in their midst to which they are only now awakening. They, and much of western Europe, are now on one of the front lines of the new war, whether they realize it or not.
Ann Coulter has an amusing column in which she shreds Bob Shrum, the architect of perennial losing demagogic political campaigns, and Mark Geragos. Like her, I’m amazed that the guy can even get clients, let alone charge them millions of dollars, given his record. The only winning case of his that I can think of is Susan McDougal vs. the Mehtas.
But she makes an interesting point that many people don’t understand:
…even Geragos and Sherman would never sneeringly dismiss evidence in a murder trial as “circumstantial evidence.” Only nonlawyers who imagine they are learning about law from “Court TV” think “circumstantial evidence” means “paltry evidence.” After leaping for the channel clicker for six months whenever the name “Scott Peterson” wafted from the television (on the grounds that in a country of 300 million people, some men will kill their wives), I offer this as my sole contribution to the endless national discussion.
In a murder case, all evidence of guilt other than eyewitness testimony is “circumstantial.” Inasmuch as most murders do not occur at Grand Central Terminal during rush hour, it is not an uncommon occurrence to have murder convictions based entirely on circumstantial evidence. DNA evidence is “circumstantial evidence.” Fingerprints are “circumstantial evidence.” An eyewitness account of the perpetrator fleeing the scene of a stabbing with a bloody knife is “circumstantial evidence.” Please stop referring to “circumstantial evidence” as if it doesn’t count. There’s a name for people who take a dim view of circumstantial evidence because they don’t understand the concept of circumstantial evidence: They’re called “O.J. jurors.”
It occured to me as I read this that “circumstantial evidence” is to the legal world what “theory” is to the scientific. The most reliable evidence, far more than eyewitness testimony, is circumstantial, and theories are the stuff that science is made of, but one would never know that to hear them denigrated by creationists. In fact, the evolution debate is a perfect example of exactly what Coulter is describing here, in which the circumstantial evidence for evolution via natural selection is overwhelming, but much of the nation are OJ jurors, because no one has caught a dog in the act of having kittens.
Just as few murders occur, as she says, during rush hour in Grand Central, the vast majority of the fossil record is lost to us as well (though there’s enough to see “transition species,” since all species are transition species). But since that’s only “circumstantial evidence” of something that’s only a “theory,” it’s unlikely that we will ever find enough evidence to satisfy people who don’t even understand how science works, or want to. And in light of that, here is a brave and admirable man.
Colling… finds a place for God in evolution by positing a
That’s what Roger Launius says that launch technology is.
Anthropomorphising technologies? Is solar power a “cheerful” technology”?
And as Clark Lindsey points out, his comparing what’s happening with today’s emerging suborbital industry with Pan Am’s selling of reservations back in the sixties is equally bizarre.
Between him and Alex Roland, one wonders if there are any NASA or space historians (other than Dwayne Day) who aren’t clueless.