Category Archives: Science And Society

I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money

So they could afford to do things more like this.

It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.

OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.

AWOL

Where is Steven Chu?

Americans expect leadership from their leaders. Chu has the track record to provide it in this case, yet he is failing to do so. If he is being hamstrung by special-interest pressure within the administration, one would expect that to be a resigning matter. I fear it is more likely that he has succumbed to pressure from his erstwhile allies, the greens, and is simply displaying a lack of backbone.

Yet he should consider what this means for his own plans. The administration’s energy plan, based on the EPA’s draconian regulations against greenhouse gas emitters, depends on a hundred new nuclear power plants being built. The administration knows that that powering America by wind and solar energy is as likely as extracting sunlight from cucumbers, which is why nuclear figures so heavily in the plan. If that option is now off the table — and the Left has been so successful in its opportunistic framing of this issue that it might well be — then there is a massive gap in the plan that can only be filled by coal or natural gas. Secretary Chu will be forced to argue that, if there is a nuclear ban, then the EPA’s beloved greenhouse-gas regulations will also have to be taken off the table. This is a circle that simply cannot be squared.

But then, leftists generally have no problem with unsquarable circles.

[Update a few minutes later]

Since he’s not up to the job, here’s a simple explanation of Fukushima.

Traffic Jams

the science.

This had me scratching my head, though. It lists the top ten most congested highways (not sure how they measure that), and I found a couple of surprises.

First, that none of them were in southern California. I would have thought that the 405 through West LA and over Sepulveda Pass into the Valley would have been a prime candidate.

Second, that they list the merge between northbound US-23 and northbound I-75, in Detroit. Only one problem. Those two highways merge in Flint, sixty miles northwest of Detroit (and my home town). And while I haven’t spent much time there lately, I have been there some, and I’m quite surprised that it beats all of the Detroit freeways for congestion. The only time I can imagine it would be a big problem is on holiday weekends with people coming from the Detroit area heading up north. Even then, it can be avoided by taking I-475 through town. I’d like to know how it got so designated. It makes me question the validity of the rest of them as well.