Orbital just had a very bad day.
[Update a while later]
You’ve probably seen the news all over by now, but here’s a spectator video [language warning]
[Update about 6 PDT]
Here’s another one, from a plane.
Fedora And Open Office
The latest Fedora 20 update seem to have broken it. It attempts to launch, and then dies with: /usr/bin/soffice: line 121: 6490 Bus error (core dumped) “$sd_prog/$sd_binary” “$@”
This is not good. I need that program. I may have to install Libre Office until it gets resolved.
Interstellar
[Tuesday-morning update]
Christopher Nolan’s epic new sci-fi film Interstellar has received measured acclaim from critics, who have praised its ambitious scale and effects but were less convinced about the story.
That was the problem with Gravity, too.
[Bumped]
How The Left Hijacks Liberalism
I’ve been fighting this word theft for years.
Climate And The Sun
How much influence does it have?
A lot more than the warm mongers want to believe, I suspect. The refusal to accept that it may play a role reminds me of followers of Ptolemy, who believed the earth the center of the universe.
Reusable Rockets
An article at Technology Review about Elon’s plans for next year.
The One-Way Trip To Mars
Why it’s doomed to fail?
It’s never looked technically/economically realistic to me.
A Boat In The Box
They just scrubbed the Antares launch of Cygnus to ISS, because the range was red due to a boat downrange. Am I the only person who thinks that this rule is stupid, and needs to be revised? As I said on Twitter, I don’t care if there’s an armada of boats in the box, as long as someone is flying a banner “AT OWN RISK.” Holding up a flight over this is insane. It’s the kind of hypercaution that keeps us from making more rapid progress in space.
The New Consensus Study
Our search resulted in 487,629 papers that mentioned “evolution” or “natural selection” in the abstract. However 451,412 of those could not definitively be placed into one of our seven position-defining categories*, no matter how hard we tried with our group of 20 reviewers. [The consensus view among us is that these reviewers are completely independent and objective; their common participation at our web site devoted to presenting pro-selection arguments, but nothing to the contrary, is just not relevant in this case.**]
Of the remaining 36,217 papers, 35,167 (97.1%) supported the consensus position that over half of the observed evolution over the twentieth century is due to natural selection. The fact that only 126 of these 35,167 papers were actually focused on critically evaluating the topic at hand, i.e. the different possible mechanistic explanations of observed evolutionary change and/or speciation (e.g. random drift, founder and other stochastic events, mutation rate variation, instantaneous genetic barriers, etc), is an irrelevant point, a complete red herring. We can reasonably assume that in at least the majority of 50% of the time, none of these 35,167 authors would indicate agreement with a position that they themselves had not carefully investigated, without having more than half of a predominantly pretty good reason for so doing***. It’s just not really half as difficult as people make it out to be when you boil it down. As we have now done. For you.
In conclusion, there is very clearly a very strong consensus as to the influence of natural selection on evolution during the twentieth century and this consensus has been increasing as the evidence increases. It is important that policy makers realize this and take action. Please pick this up and disseminate it widely so everybody knows about it; everyone else is, so you will be part of the consensus effort if you do. Thank you.
Heh.
Sharyl Atkisson’s Laptop
“Worse than anything the Nixon administration ever did.”
And how about this? “Both CBS and the White House declined to comment.”
You don’t say.
[Update a few minutes later]
If Sharyl Attkisson didn't want a virus on her computer, she should have self-quarantined against bad news about the Administration.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) October 27, 2014
[Update a while later]
Thoughts from (lawyer) John Hindraker at Powerline:
If this were a Republican administration, every reporter in Washington would be on the story, as would various law enforcement agencies. Given that we are talking about a Democratic president, Attkisson shouldn’t expect any help. If I were she, I would hire one of the top litigation firms in Washington and look into suing appropriate federal agencies. That won’t be easy; the most obvious obstacle is that she has to have evidence that a particular agency was involved in the hacking/spying operation in order to survive a motion to dismiss, but it will be hard (maybe impossible) to get that evidence without the ability to do discovery in the lawsuit. But having her own lawsuit allows her to run her own show, and private lawyers are generally far more effective at unearthing and processing information than, say, Congressional committees.
Yup.