A team of geologists believe that an asteroid impact may have altered history, and saved Christianity.

I’m telling you, we’ve got to keep our eyes out for those things.

If true, this is just plain weird.

As the page points out, it’s unfortunately not unheard of for men of the cloth to solicit prostitutes, but well, go read it.

On second thought, maybe he should switch to the Church of England. They’d probably make him a bishop.

John Derbyshire reminds us of Robert Conquest’s Three Rules Of Politics. I thought the third one was most applicable to our friendly neighborhood space agency:

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

I remember when the Republicans won the Congress in 1994, and wondering when I would actually see some tangible benefit from it. The first time that I felt that there was really a change in the country was when they repealed the idiotic national speed limit, and I could once again drive legally at a rational pace.

Well, according to the DOT, it turns out that it’s not only increased national productivity, but it’s had no measurable effect on increased loss of life (and may even have reduced traffic deaths).

I’ve long thought that 55 was more deadly, for several reasons. It increased the lengths of trips, making driver fatigue more likely. It also made for more boring driving, resulting in an increase in driver inattention.

I suspect that it also reduced traffic on the freeways, shifting it to the more-dangerous primary highways, since the advantage of using the freeways was greatly diminished by the low speed limit. I know that I tended to use back roads more, because the freeway wasn’t much faster, and the trip was more interesting. And of course, it was particularly stupid to impose a fifty-five MPH speed limit on a freeway that was designed for seventy (and for a different generation of cars, that handled and braked much more poorly than modern ones).

It’s not absolute speed that’s dangerous on the highway–it’s relative speed. In fact, that’s why it’s unfortunate that most states don’t post minimum speeds as well as maximum. Growing up in Michigan, the speed limit on the freeways was minimum 45, maximum 70, and you could get a ticket for driving too slowly as well as too fast. In fact, I think that’s too large a spread, since you have cars sharing the road with a differential of twenty five miles an hour. I think that sixty-five to eighty would in fact be safer, given the performance of modern cars. If there are three lanes, you might allow slow traffic in the far right, but otherwise speed should be generally encouraged, within reason.

Anyway, Steven Moore has a piece in NRO today on the stupid hysteria of Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook and the other safety nannies, and the fact that they refuse to accept the steaming plate of crow they so richly deserve.

I remember when the Republicans won the Congress in 1994, and wondering when I would actually see some tangible benefit from it. The first time that I felt that there was really a change in the country was when they repealed the idiotic national speed limit, and I could once again drive legally at a rational pace.

Well, according to the DOT, it turns out that it’s not only increased national productivity, but it’s had no measurable effect on increased loss of life (and may even have reduced traffic deaths).

I’ve long thought that 55 was more deadly, for several reasons. It increased the lengths of trips, making driver fatigue more likely. It also made for more boring driving, resulting in an increase in driver inattention.

I suspect that it also reduced traffic on the freeways, shifting it to the more-dangerous primary highways, since the advantage of using the freeways was greatly diminished by the low speed limit. I know that I tended to use back roads more, because the freeway wasn’t much faster, and the trip was more interesting. And of course, it was particularly stupid to impose a fifty-five MPH speed limit on a freeway that was designed for seventy (and for a different generation of cars, that handled and braked much more poorly than modern ones).

It’s not absolute speed that’s dangerous on the highway–it’s relative speed. In fact, that’s why it’s unfortunate that most states don’t post minimum speeds as well as maximum. Growing up in Michigan, the speed limit on the freeways was minimum 45, maximum 70, and you could get a ticket for driving too slowly as well as too fast. In fact, I think that’s too large a spread, since you have cars sharing the road with a differential of twenty five miles an hour. I think that sixty-five to eighty would in fact be safer, given the performance of modern cars. If there are three lanes, you might allow slow traffic in the far right, but otherwise speed should be generally encouraged, within reason.

Anyway, Steven Moore has a piece in NRO today on the stupid hysteria of Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook and the other safety nannies, and the fact that they refuse to accept the steaming plate of crow they so richly deserve.

I remember when the Republicans won the Congress in 1994, and wondering when I would actually see some tangible benefit from it. The first time that I felt that there was really a change in the country was when they repealed the idiotic national speed limit, and I could once again drive legally at a rational pace.

Well, according to the DOT, it turns out that it’s not only increased national productivity, but it’s had no measurable effect on increased loss of life (and may even have reduced traffic deaths).

I’ve long thought that 55 was more deadly, for several reasons. It increased the lengths of trips, making driver fatigue more likely. It also made for more boring driving, resulting in an increase in driver inattention.

I suspect that it also reduced traffic on the freeways, shifting it to the more-dangerous primary highways, since the advantage of using the freeways was greatly diminished by the low speed limit. I know that I tended to use back roads more, because the freeway wasn’t much faster, and the trip was more interesting. And of course, it was particularly stupid to impose a fifty-five MPH speed limit on a freeway that was designed for seventy (and for a different generation of cars, that handled and braked much more poorly than modern ones).

It’s not absolute speed that’s dangerous on the highway–it’s relative speed. In fact, that’s why it’s unfortunate that most states don’t post minimum speeds as well as maximum. Growing up in Michigan, the speed limit on the freeways was minimum 45, maximum 70, and you could get a ticket for driving too slowly as well as too fast. In fact, I think that’s too large a spread, since you have cars sharing the road with a differential of twenty five miles an hour. I think that sixty-five to eighty would in fact be safer, given the performance of modern cars. If there are three lanes, you might allow slow traffic in the far right, but otherwise speed should be generally encouraged, within reason.

Anyway, Steven Moore has a piece in NRO today on the stupid hysteria of Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook and the other safety nannies, and the fact that they refuse to accept the steaming plate of crow they so richly deserve.

Over at Alan Boyle’s site, he, with his commenters, is resurrecting an activity in which many have indulged over the years: coming up with a name for the ISS that doesn’t suck (as does, for example, Alpha). As one commenter points out, “Remember ?Space 1999?? Do we really want to risk the return of the stylin? flare pants and platform shoes worn by the crew?”

Someone suggests naming it after “Sagan or Arthur C. Clarke or Heinlein or Asimov.”

Frankly, if I were one of those people (of whom, sadly, only one is still with us), I’d be appalled to have my name attached to this ongoing program disaster. It would particularly be a travesty to sully Heinlein’s memory in such a way, because the space station stands in stark and stubborn opposition to almost everything that he believed in life. Recall that he was the man who wrote “The Man Who Sold The Moon,” a paen to free enterprise in space. Any random sampling of Lazarus Long’s notebooks would find an abundance of quotes indicating just what he would have thought of this malformed creature of bureaucracy and politics (e.g., “An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications…”).

Asimov might be a little more appropriate, because he was much more of a collectivist (as was Sagan), but even for him, I think that it would dishonor the memory of someone who had such expansive visions of the future.

In the true spirit of Sagan, one reader suggests:

Instead of Alpha, how about calling it ?The Great Black Hole?! For the cost of the ISS space station, we could have launched 20 Cassini- and Hubble-sized spacecraft overall. The ISS has literally sucked the life out of planetary science and space exploration.

Of course, as always, this is misleading, because it assumes that if the station hadn’t been funded, that the money would have gone to those other purposes, but there’s no reason to believe that. Station got funding for its own reasons, and NASA had no discretion to reallocate those funds to planetary exploration–only Congress can do that. Less money for space stations doesn’t mean more money for robotic probes–they have to justify their budgets on their own.

Still, he has a good point, and at least it comes much closer to truth in advertising.

Most of the other suggestions make an assumption that the station is something worthy of a lofty name–that it actually is a magnificent technological achievement that will be a vital stepping stone to a thrilling human future in space.

There’s an old joke about an optimist believing that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and a pessimist fearing that the optimist is right.

If your mindset is one of believing NASA when they say space is hard, and expensive, and can only be done the way they do it, and that this is the best that can be done with tens of billions of dollars over decades, then you’ll look at the station with awe and pride, and want to attach a worthy apellation to it.

But if, like me, you believe that (at least from a perspective of making true progress in space) the space station program was a tragic mistake–a dead technological end, and a distraction from our true future, you’ll want to give it a name that represents that. With the Shuttle and the station, the space agency has driven into an expensive cul de sac from which it seemingly cannot find a way out, and it’s one from which programs like an Orbital Space Plane (in whatever form) offer no exit.

I believe that the name of the station should reflect its reality, and from that viewpoint, I continue to believe that the most appropriate name for it comes from Coleridge:

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Thus, I offer up what I consider the most appropriate name for that hole in the sky into which we continue to pour money and dreams: Space Station Albatross.

I suspect that only when NASA finally lets it sink “like lead into the sea” will we be able to get on with actually exploring and developing space.

Mark Whittington has a long rebuttal to Jeff Foust’s commentary at The Space Review, about the “coming space race with China.” It’s worth reading, though I still believe that such a race, now or in the future, is a mirage.

I do need to respond to one point in particular:

One interesting point against the idea of a Chinese space threat was made recently by Rand Simberg in his Transterrestrial Musings weblog. He stated, ?a true free- market approach (of which, under the current regime, I suspect they?re incapable) will leave them in the dust. That?s why I don?t even consider them relevant to our species? future in space, unless they display some dramatic change in approach.? The problem is that the United States is not following a free market approach in space flight. NASA is still insisting on running its own space line, rather than going to the private sector for launch services, for example.

Mark hasn’t been paying attention. Certainly NASA isn’t taking a free-market approach, but the country is increasingly doing so (note the rising number of stories of dot commies finally putting their money where their mouths are).

At this point, I still consider both China and NASA irrelevancies to our future in space. But by the third and final page of his piece, I think that all three of us are ultimately in agreement.

In a post last week about Burt Rutan’s self-inflicted regulatory problems, I wrote that:

I should add that moving off shore wouldn’t help him either, unless he renounces his citizenship as well. The US position is that it is regulatorily responsible for launch activities of US entities, regardless of their location on the planet, because of liability provisions of the Outer Space Treaty (yet another reason to get out of it).

As Anglospherian Jim Bennett reminds me, this is a little oversimplified description of the situation. He could, in fact, go off shore if he can get some other nation to accept responsibility for the launch, which would let the US off the hook for it.

Just one catch. He’d have to apply for a technology export license, and I suspect that getting one granted would be much easier said than done, particularly in the post-911 climate. The only way around this would be to simply go overseas by himself, with no hardware–just what was in his head, and then purchase the components and build it there. And I’m not sure that he’d even be able to get around it that way.

Anyway, the point is moot, since he’s already declared he’s going to fly out of Mojave.

Christopher Hitchens romnifies John Kerry.

So, the junior senator from Massachusetts has finally come up with a winning line. “Vote for me,” says John Kerry. “I’m easily fooled.” This appears to be the implication of his claim to have been “misled” by the Bush administration in the matter of WMD. And, considering the way in which Democratic Party activists generally portray the president as a fool and an ignoramus, one might as well go the whole distance and suggest a catchy line for the campaign: “Kerry. Duped by a Dope.”

And yes, I know that “romnifies” isn’t a word, but it should be, and maybe now it will be.