…is near.
Good. It’s long overdue. Couldn’t happen to a better group of thugs.
Category Archives: Business
EPA
John Stossell says “Enough Protection Already.”
The amount of mendacity from the Left about Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” is more staggering than usual. It’s almost as bad as the health-care lies.
Graphene
Is there anything it can’t do? OK, probably, but this is pretty cool:
“Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology,” Rahul Nair, professor of material physics at the University of Manchester, said in a statement.
Previously researchers were unable to remove common salts using the graphene filtering technique, instead removing small nanoparticles and organic molecules.
“This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime. We also demonstrate that there are realistic possibilities to scale up the described approach and mass produce graphene-based membranes with required sleeve sizes,” Nair added.
It will probably have useful purefying properties in general, but this would be useful for California as well as the Third World.
Capitalism In Space
Deuterized Drugs
The first one has arrived. The big advantage of this, according to a Twitter discussion with Derek, is that dosage times are much less critical.
Milspace
An interview with Mike Rogers. At the Space Symposium today he announced that he’s going to introduce legislation to create a Space Corps, attached to the Air Force, presumably per Coyote’s recommendation. This was amusing, though:
Is the development of a replacement for the Atlas 5 rocket’s RD-180 moving quickly enough? Is it moving in a direction you’re satisfied with?
Well, it’s not quick enough. I’m very happy that we’re staying after it. My subcommittee, our full committee, this Congress, is committed to not stop until we have an American-made engine that can get our national security space assets launched. And we’re not going to stop. I’m encouraged. I think we’re pretty close to getting a new engine that’s going to be viable.
Pretty sure he wants to engine that will be built in Alabama, even though no rocket manufacturer wants it.
“Now To Make It Pay Off”
Jeff Foust’s take on the SpaceX success, over at The Space Review. I’d like to be surprised that people are surprised, but I’m not. Elon could have regular service operating between earth and Mars, with thousands living there, while NASA is still planning the first flight of SLS, and some people would complain that he’s not building starships.
Science On The Hill
The hearing has started, with Judith Curry, Roger Pielke, John Christy, and Michael Mann.
[Update about 10:32 EDT]
Mann uses the BS 97% number, and complains that he’s the only one on the panel “in the mainstream.”
[Update early afternoon]
Here is Judith Curry’s written testimony.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here is all the written testimony. I’ll refrain from comment.
[Update a while later]
Here’s the story from Seth Borenstein:
At first Mann said he didn’t call Curry a denier. But in his written not oral testimony he called Curry “a climate science denier.” Mann said there’s a difference between denying climate change and “denying established science” on how much humans cause climate change, which he said Curry did.
But there’s this:
Former Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, who often clashes with mainstream science…
I don’t think she ever clashes with science, but I’m not sure what the hell “mainstream” is in this context.
[Monday-afternoon update]
The warm mongers’ five worst moments of that hearing.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Another point of view from an eyewitness:
The big obstacle: managing bodies of the NAS, formerly respected academic societies, and foreign national academies adopted statements that either outright support or do not contradict climatist pseudo-science. This is an important fact. Of course, there are two causes for that: internal corruption that has been happening over decades and pressure from the Obama administration and its counterparts in other Western countries. Democrat Congresspersons might congratulate themselves for their contribution to shutting up opposition views. But it is hard to convince Republicans that this happened in front of their eyes and under the watch of many of them.
The problem with the academia extends beyond the climate debate. My thoughts are that sometimes things are too broken for repair, and can be only replaced. A replacement should be built before the old thing is discarded.
Lawmakers should be aware that they might need to rebuild American scientific enterprise and academia almost from scratch: create new universities and national labs, extricate competent departments, teams, and individuals from the corrupt institutions, and let them to grow organically in the atmosphere free from the interference from the Leftist and hostile foreign bodies. This is where the federal research and education budgets should go, rather than on continuing support of morally, intellectually, and soon financially bankrupt institutions.
The small obstacle, limited to this panel, was a problematic panel of witnesses. From the outside, it seemed to consist of three skeptics and one “consensus scientist.” In fact, it consisted of Michael Mann, two lukewarmers, and respected Dr. John Christy who, nevertheless, shook hands with Michael Mann in front of my eyes. Thus, the climate alarmism was represented by its most extreme representative, while opposition to climate alarmism was hardly represented at all.
It’s long, but read the whole thing.
[Tuesday-morning update]
The Dawn Of Commercial Spaceflight
I’m still trying to put what happened yesterday into historical perspective, but I think it will be one of the top five events of the first sixty years of space history. I wish we’d done it decades ago.
Saving Climate Science From Itself
This was a useful recommendation to come out of Wednesday’s hearing. We use red teams for proposals; why not for science, especially considering that fewer than one percent of published papers actually follow the scientific method?