Am I the only one who thinks that this is an hilarious story?
Prosecutors can’t read Libby’s handwriting
Ex-Cheney chief of staff asked to decipher notes in Plame case
Talk about Keystone Kops.
All posts by Rand Simberg
Aliens Having S3x
This is a pretty funny cartoon, and as Professor Volokh points out, it shows how the whole “can’t show pictures of Mohammed” thing has descended into self parody.
So now, the perennially offended muslims are offended by a cartoon of which there’s no way to tell from the image itself whether it’s Mohammed or not–one can only tell from the context of the joke.
It reminds me of the story a few years ago about the bar in Colorado that had to stop selling teeshirts that depicted two aliens having s3x because they were too lewd for the town elders. I (and no doubt others) pointed out that if they were aliens, there was no way to tell whether or not the activity in which they were engaged was s3xu@l (sorry–I don’t want to get top-listed on google for the search “aliens s3x”). They could, for example, simply have been feeding each other, or communicating somehow. One occasional commenter here, in fact, emailed me at the time that it reminded him of the old “Life in Hell” strip when Binky (or one of the other one-eared rabbits) is being chastised for smoking, and he says “I’m not smoking–I’m sucking p00p through a straw.”
That’s the point to which this idiocy has devolved. Eugene is right:
Well, I have to admit: The folks who are offended by this have a First Amendment right to be offended. They should feel entirely free to be offended.
The rest of us should feel entirely free, as a matter of civility as well as of law, to say: Your decision to be offended by this particular cartoon gives you no rights (again, as a matter of civility as well as of law) to tell us to stop printing it.
More on the underlying conceptual issue
Space Elevator Progress
Liftport has had a successful test.
All The News Not Fit To Print
An Iraqi mayor gives thanks to America and its troops:
Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed. Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city. Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young. This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated this city, ridding it of Zarqawi
A Precious Quote
From Henry Spencer, over at sci.space.policy:
As various people have pointed out in the past, to judge by the fuss that gets made when a few of them die, astronauts clearly are priceless national assets — exactly the sort of people you should not be risking in an experimental-class vehicle.
Life In The Twenty-First Century
Using nanotube structures, the LEES invention promises a significant increase on the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at an atomic level. The new LEES ultracapacitors could replace the conventional battery in everything from the smallest MP3 players through to electric automobiles and beyond, yielding batteries with a lifetime equivalent to the product they power and recharging times inside a minute. Most significantly, they promise a much smaller and lighter
Down The Memory Hole
Gaaahhhh…
They’ve changed the story. Note same link as before, but all references to Wilson and the 2003 SOTU have been deleted, just as I feared they would (thanks to emailer Abigail Brayden). Guess that story never even happened.
And of all the bad luck, I’d been keeping the original one open in a window, just in case they did this. But I had a computer freezeup this morning, had to reboot (thanks, Microsoft!) and I hadn’t captured a screenshot.
But as the Abigail points out, what they did was redirect the original link to the new story. The old one is still there, with a new URL.
Interesting. Here’s something else interesting. The Deseret News has a version of the story from Friday in which the wording has been changed to make it more accurate. It now reads:
Wilson’s revelations cast doubt on President Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear bomb and had sought to buy uranium in Africa as one of the administration’s key justifications for going to war in Iraq.
I wonder who edited that one, and if it was in response to blogospheric complaints? And, of course, still no response from AP to my email.
A Real Paper Rocket
A lot of people disparage newcomers to the space field as having “paper rockets.”
Well, at little cost, you can now make your own paper Saturn V. And here’s another company that’s going to be offering a paper MLP and crawler. The pictures are pretty amazing, considering the construction materials.
Lunar Transportation Infrastructure
Tom Cuddihy (to whom congratulations on his upcoming marriage are owed), inspired by some musings on the subject by Jon Goff, runs some numbers on reusing lunar landers, and finds that (unsurprisingly), it doesn’t make sense. At least with the assumptions that he uses.
The utility of reusable space transportation elements is heavily dependent on the cost of propellants in all of the transportation nodes through which they operate. If we are going to deliver all propellants from earth, to the surface of the moon, using chemical propulsion, then it’s not possible to justify reuse of the lander (and in fact it would be impossible to justify reuse of the crew module itself, except for the fact that we have to return crew, anyway). If we are to have a cost-effective cis-lunar transportation infrastructure, it’s not sufficient to get the cost of LEO delivery down (though it is certainly necessary). We also either need to manufacture propellants on the moon, or deliver them to L1 via low-thrust high-Isp tugs from LEO, or both.
This was discussed (I believe–at least I wrote a lengthy input to it) in the final Boeing report on the CE&R contract (a document that NASA apparently never even bothered to look at once Steidle was fired and they came up with ESAS).
OK, enough space blogging for a while. I’ve got to get back to work.
Why NASA?
At The Space Review today, in the context of NASA’s new budget, Jeff Foust reprises one of my recurring themes–that we can’t make sensible policy decisions until we decide what we’re trying to accomplish and what the purpose of a space program is.
These editorials all seem to follow the old argument that robots are better, cheaper, and safer means of exploring the solar system than humans. However, buried in that debate is a deeper issue that is almost never brought up in superficial newspaper editorials and other commentary: what is NASA