Every day, I get offers for: acting classes, teeth whitening, massage packages with reflexology and aromatherapy, microdermabrasion facials, tanning salons, exfoliation…
It’s like they’re trying to live down to the expectations of the rest of the country.
[Update a few minutes later]
Are you the kind of person likely to be suckered into a conversation with a Twitter-bot?
I’m not.
…is winning the Internets. Too bad more Republicans don’t get it.
Speaking of Issa, he apparently has proof of collusion between the FEC and the IRS in investigating Tea-Party groups. Wouldn’t be surprising at all, given Lerner’s history.
I’ve been having pretty bad luck finding one that works for multiple accounts. I installed Choqok a few days ago, and was pretty happy with it until it broke today. When I launch it, it immediately sucks up about half the CPU, but doesn’t actually start, and leaves a pretty picture in the middle of the screen, independent of what application I’m using. I have to kill it to shut it down. Googling around, I’ve found this to be an issue if you have a lot of unread tweets, but since I can’t functionally start it, there’s no way to read them and fix it.
So then I tried Qwit, which installed fine, and went to Twitter to authenticate my three accounts, and said they’d been approved. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t either display or send tweets for any of them. Other than that, it’s awesome.
I’ve also tried Gwibber, which runs fine, except when I go to the Edit/Accounts menu, it does nothing.
So I’m back to using two different browsers (Firefox and Midori) for two of my accounts, and not doing anything with the third one (which is my book account). I’d like to solve this before the book is available, though, which is likely to be next week.
[Thursday-morning update]
OK, the solution I’ve found that seems to be working pretty well is the Tweetdeck app for Google Chrome. There may be one for Firefox, too, but I’ll stick with Chrome as long as it doesn’t act up.
[Bumped]
Here’s some news you can use. I did not know that.
No, Mr. President. It was best built by America’s entrepreneurs.
This is one of many reasons why high-speed rail will be a fiscal disaster.
Ummmmmm…no. Just no.
Though they might be useful in space.
The back story.
This is something that used to concern space activists even in the seventies:
“In my comic, our civilization is long gone. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more,” Munroe told WIRED. “And as astronomer Fred Hoyle has pointed out, since we’ve stripped away the easily-accessed fossil fuels, whatever civilization comes along next won’t be able to jump-start an industrial revolution the way we did.”
You could think of fossil fuels as the yolk of an egg. If we eat it up, but fail to hatch and get into space, then this planet won’t reproduce.
Thoughts on energy and war from Bob Zubrin:
In World War II, we controlled the oil. In this war, the enemy does. This is an unacceptable situation, because it places our fate in the hands of people who want to kill us. In World War II, we had no compunction about destroying the Nazi fuel-making facilities at Ploesti and Leuna, or about systematically sinking the Japanese tanker fleet, because we didn’t need their oil. As we have seen, those attacks were incredibly effective in breaking the enemy’s power. On May 12, 1944, the day of the Leuna raid, the Third Reich ruled an empire comprising nearly all of continental Europe, with a collective population and industrial potential exceeding that of the United States. A year later, it did not exist. Once Japan’s tanker fleet was sunk, the collapse of its empire was almost as fast. Today we are confronted by an enemy without a shadow of the armaments of the Axis; all the Islamist countries have is oil. Were we to destroy that power, they would be left with nothing at all. But we can’t hit them where it would truly hurt, because our economy needs their oil to survive.
And we have people in power who think that climate change is a bigger risk than totalitarianism. Because, you know, in many ways, they don’t mind totalitarianism that much, as long as it’s their own.
First, I don’t have any particular itch to go to, or send people to Mars. I think it can wait. I also see the potential to repeat the error of Apollo if we follow Dr. Thronson’s advice:
A useful tautology: humanity’s second—or third or fourth—mission to Mars will never happen unless there is a first one. Vastly more resources have been expended on concept design and technologies that appear to be necessary for sustained Martian exploration, with comparatively fewer specifically on the most essential mission, the first one. Just as with all programs of human exploration, the first Mars expedition will be very—very!—different from every one that follows. It will have to be more limited, more focused, and necessarily affordable from the start. More will be learned on a first mission, no matter how limited it is some respects, than on any subsequent one. However, in the current, uncritical, and comfortable environment for proliferating concepts for human exploration beyond LEO, there seems to be only modest interest in the difficult process of in-depth, critically reviewed engineering designs for the first Mars mission.
I disagree that “all programs of human exploration” had a first mission that was “very-very! different” from those that followed. The Vikings did nothing different on their succeeding journeys than they did on their previous ones. Neither did the Polynesians. There was little difference between Columbus’s first voyage, and his subsequent ones, or those of others. They all used the same basic technology. There were no significant differences until the technology evolved — more efficient sails, canned food, ship-board clocks for navigation, steel hulls, steam engines. Similarly, most exploration of the North American continent were very similar, from the initial ones by the early French explorers to Lewis and Clark, through Walker and Fremont. Not until the development of first the Conestoga, and then the railroad was there any significant improvement. In fact, as I write in the book:
Once Columbus showed the way, fortune seekers and settlers didn’t wait for shipboard clocks, or steam engines, or steel hulls. They set sail for the New World with what they had. A century or so ago, Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét wrote a poem about the days of sail, whose first stanza was:
There was a time before our time,
It will not come again,
When the best ships still were wooden ships
But the men were iron men.
Even with Apollo, the subsequent missions weren’t that different from the first, in terms of how they were carried out, except they got better at navigation and precision in landing sites, and took more equipment, such as rovers, to expand the science. So I don’t accept his premise that the first Mars landing will be significantly different than the second one. But the next series of lunar missions will doubtless be much different from Apollo, because Apollo was done in an economically unsustainable way, because there was a national imperative to do it. We have to avoid that with Mars.
I also think that there are some elements of straw man here. No, we don’t need to go to the moon to get to Mars. But we do need to develop some infrastructure if we are going to do it in anything resembling an affordable way, and no, a government-developed heavy lifter is not part of that infrastructure. But I don’t see any societal will to compel the government to do a manned Mars mission in the foreseeable future. If it happens, it will happen privately.