Katherine Mangu-Ward has found the Newt-ET connection.
More Media Dietary Ignorance
So, here we have a young woman in the UK who has has eaten nothing but Chicken McNuggets™ her whole life, and is in poor health, but a mystery remains:
…despite a diet that regularly means she eats at least a third more than the 56g of fat recommended by experts, she manages to keep relatively trim.
This may be down to the amount of exercise she does or to her metabolism.
Or maybe, just maybe, eating fat is not what makes you fat.
It is an awful diet, to be sure, but not because of what’s in it (fat) but because of what is not (healthy vegetables). It has a reasonable balance of protein and carbs (though it would be better if the carbs weren’t a batter, and could be a little lower). It’s the lack of nutrients that is killing her, not the fat.
Michael Mann’s UVA Emails
A first look. Well, now we now why they fought so hard to avoid release.
NASA’s “Day Of Remembrance”
OK, so the anniversary (forty-fifth) of the Apollo I fire is tomorrow, the twenty-sixth Challenger anniversary is Saturday, and Wednesday is the ninth anniversary of the Columbia loss. So why commemorate today?
Meanwhile, On Tatooine
A Space Business Interview With Jeff Greason
With a bonus appearance by Chuck Lauer.
NASA’s Irrational Approach To Risk
Bob Zubrin asks how much an astronaut is worth. I don’t think that this is historically accurate, though:
The attempted Hubble desertion demonstrates how a refusal to accept human risk has led to irresponsible conduct on the part of NASA’s leadership. The affair was such a wild dereliction of duty, in fact, that O’Keefe was eventually forced out and the shuttle mission completed by his replacement.
That’s not how I remember it. I recall at the time that I thought, and even advocated, that O’Keefe step down, because he had demonstrated himself unable to do the job, being traumatized by having to tell the Columbia families and friends on the tarmac at KSC that their loved ones weren’t coming home, which is probably what caused his timidity about Hubble. But I’m aware of no evidence that he was “forced out” over the decision. I thought that he simply wanted out of the job and took the best offer that came along. The administration would have been loath to remove an administrator, knowing how hard it is to find a good one. Someone should write a letter to the Reason editor on this. Bob either needs to substantiate this with a credible citation, or the magazine should run a correction. Because I think it’s wishful thinking on his part.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bad link, it’s fixed now, sorry.
[Mid-afternoon update]
While I criticized O’Keefe at the time, I didn’t actually disagree with the Hubble decision at the time. The problem that I saw with it was that it was based on irrational criteria. All the focus was on astronaut safety, and no one seemed to be considering how disastrous it would be if we lost another orbiter. NASA had no shortage of astronauts, but there were only three birds left in the fleet, and we would have had to complete ISS with only two, if the program survived at all. Add to that the fact that we probably could have launched an improved Hubble replacement for the cost of the repair mission, and the decision to do it was irrational in its own way, driven by an emotional attachment to the telescope that had shown so many wonders over the past decade.
The Zero-Sum President
It’s just one more example of his profound ignorance of economics.
Obama’s Foreign Policy In The SOTU
Most people have been fact checking all the nonsense that was in the domestic portion of the president’s speech last night, which was its focus, but Barry Rubin vigorously fisks the crack pipery that was the foreign-policy bits.
A Pro Tip
Don’t gash your knee horizontally right on the patella. I did it early Tuesday morning when I bumped into a glass framed picture in the dark. It also made a bloody mess on the bedroom carpet. Alcohol was not involved. Much.
I got staples in it today and it hurts like hell to bend it, and probably will for the next week or two until they’re removed. There’s just a lot of tension there when you stretch the skin, and the staples pull on it. I’ll be hobbling around for a while, especially up and down stairs. It will also be an ongoing joy to work a clutch. Fortunately, it doesn’t affect typing, except I have to work a little further back from the screen/keyboard because of my outstretched leg.
This may or may not be TMI.
[Thursday-morning update]
Thanks for all the well wishes in comments. It’s actually feeling better today. It will probably be stiff until I get the staples removed and relieve the tension on the skin, but I’m walking almost normally, albeit gingerly.