Now, the “off-the-shelf” five-segment first stage for the Ares 1 is going to a new propellant formulation, for environmental reasons. No, that won’t take long or cost much to develop or test. And apparently we don’t even have the capability in country to do it currently — we have to rely on the Swedes.
If they were worried about the environment, they shouldn’t have gone with a solid in the first place.
How long before this monstrosity is put out of its (and our) misery? They need to just take the whole concept out behind the VABarn and put it down with a sledge hammer.
I always laugh when I go into the candy aisle, and see all of these pure sugar concoctions labeled “fat free.” They may not have fat, but they can make you that way in a hurry. It’s also one more reason not to want to have our government, local or federal, nannying our health and diet. A lot of dietary advice is ignorant, or driven by political agendas.
Some thoughts from Bob Zubrin, who apparently has a new book
out on the subject.
I have to say, though, that when he says:
It’s a common view that Columbus was just interested in finding a spice route to the Indies, and that was his sales pitch to the Spanish courts. But I actually believe that contrary to conventional history, Columbus was looking for unknown continents — he just couldn’t pitch it that way.
I’d be curious to know the basis for that belief, or if it’s just wishful thinking or projection. My reading of the history does not indicate that Columbus was averse to making a buck.
An interesting discussion branching off from questions about the benefits of resveratrol. It seems pretty clear to me that there’s no evolutionary pressure to live much past the time that your offspring (or perhaps grand-offspring) are off on their own. And that it violates no laws of physics to figure out how to cheat mother nature in that regard.
Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”
In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.
Why can’t some people get with the program? Thankfully, though, mz will be along any minute to call Professor Dyson “stupid.”
Alan Boyle has a piece on what looks to be an interesting PBS series on biblical archaeology. I agree that it is not the archaeologist’s job to either prove, or disprove creation myths. His job is to, as best as can be done, utilize the scientific method to figure out what the past really was.
…to the charlatans like Jim Hansen. Here are two useful books. First, Cool It, by Bjorn Lomborg who, while he doesn’t deny the science behind global warming, he doesn’t need to, because he has actually prioritized useful government policy actions based on cost and benefit (something that the warm-mongers refuse to do, e.g., Kyoto). Second, from Chris Horner, Red Hot Lies, which is well described by its subtitle: “How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.
Yup. As many reviewers note, “climate change” isn’t really about science–it’s just the latest ideology to come along for the collectivists to use in their latest attempt to bend us to their will.
