I went over to SpaceX this morning to hear them speak, with the first Dragon to go into space (it was a repeat of their show in McGregor, Texas yesterday with the Dragon that flew the recent mission). There are a bunch of pictures at SpaceflightNow. I don’t think I’m in any of them. I was standing in the press area, just below the vantage point of most of the shots.
You might see some bulges on the side of the Dragon to the right rear. I asked Elon if those were the pods and thrusters for the abort/landing motors. He said they were, but that the design was still in flux. I also asked him if there were cosine losses, and he said yes, that they are unavoidable, since you can’t thrust straight down from the side of a cone.
It is unseemly and stupid for Washington to remonstrate with the Russians for playing the spoiler in Syria, for example by providing the Assad regime with attack helicopters. The way to deal with this dog is to beat up the dog’s owner, namely Tehran. Washington’s pathetic display of solicitude towards a terrorist regime that uses negotiations to buy time for nuclear weapons development aggravates every other problem in the region, Syria above all.
The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Voters shows Romney with 47% of the vote to Obama’s 44%. Five percent (5%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.
Hard to see a path to victory for him if he loses Wisconsin.
[Afternoon update]
The GOP is born again, in Wisconsin. Most people aren’t aware that the state is the birthplace of the party.
Once again government has created the conditions for wholesale failure, and failure is upon us.
From 1976 to 2010, the prices of all commodities rose 280 percent. The price of homes rose 400 percent. Private education? A whopping 1,000 percent.
In the end, this bubble will be worse than the last. Even when homeowners got hopelessly behind on their mortgages, two options helped. First, they could declare bankruptcy and free themselves of their crippling debt; second, they could sell their houses to pay down most of their loans.
Students don’t have either of these options. It’s illegal to absolve student loan debt through bankruptcy, and you can’t sell back an education.
I hope that it has a disproportionate effect on the academic left. In a sane world, the first thing to go would be diversity programs, with “studies” departments hard on their heels.
Later, while putting together a post at the kitchen table: DING DONG
Two earnest cause-mongers campaigning on behalf of the earth. I wanted to say “nature ripped out the bunnies from their soft home and drank their blood, and you want me to help it? With money?” but I just said “sorry, I work at home, and I’m working now” before they even got the chance to start the spiel. Their faces fell from friendly to sullen in a second like souffles collapsing from the sound of gunshot, and they seemed perturbed. I hadn’t been unfriendly; I’d smiled. Just stated the facts. I’m under no obligation to stand here and listen to what you care about. Sometimes I’m tempted to cut out an editorial and tape it to the door, and when I see someone coming around with a Cause, open the door and start reading out the particulars of my cause, and ask them what they would like to do. I’d have a petition and everything. And if they signed, I’d say thanks, and close the door.
I lecture Jehovah’s Witnesses on space theology. They never last long.