…and its threat to liberty, as currently interpreted. The Supreme Court has a chance to finally get this right, after decades of Wickard-driven federal tyranny, but I fear they won’t.
[Update a while later]
Related: does the Constitution protect the unenumerated right to economic liberty? If not, as Glenn says, the Ninth Amendment is a dead letter.
That uses sun and sand. He should work on a version to test on the moon.
Should not have been at all surprising.
…that seem to work in the brain. Faster, please.
After sixty years of searching, researchers still can’t find it.
I say it’s too early to give up. I will steadfastly continue the search, on my own, if need be. Volunteer searchees can contact me via email, or in chat rooms.
From above. Not clear whether this is aerial or satellite.
Ummmmmm…no:
Rogozin, at least, admitted that a far more plausible cause was a failure on the spacecraft itself. “Practially all disruptions are due to flaws in the technologies manufactured 12 to 13 years ago,” he said. And a new and highly plausible report issued today further supports the leading theory: that the craft’s autopilot software had never been adequately debugged. The probe’s chief scientist, Alexander Zakharov, also denounced the interference theory as “exotic” and “disingenuous.”
The Russians have space tracking blind spots around the world because they scrapped their sea-going tracking ships years ago, and closed down other ground sites. The space program’s tracking ability is so limited that shortly before the launch of Fobos-Grunt, a program scientist emailed amateur astronomers in South America, asking them to go outside when the probe was passing overhead and report whether its rocket was firing on time. (It wasn’t, as it turned out.)
And as for Kwajalein, scientists familiar with worldwide radar tracking of asteroids assure me they’ve never heard of any participation by radars based there. If asked, they would have told Kommersant the same thing.
Sadly, this knee-jerk blame shifting in the space industry has ramped up in recent years. The real danger in the Russian nonsense about finding the United States at fault for the crash isn’t just the blow to diplomacy and public attitudes. Also important is how such claims prevent a proper investigation and get in the way of implementing a reliable “fix.”
Phantom “causes” lead to delusional, even damaging, responses. That raises the level of danger to which everybody whose lives depend on Russian spacecraft—and that now includes U.S. and other astronauts—is exposed.
Yup. And it’s looking more and more like it was a software problem.
They don’t give Colbert much respect. Of course, any amount is too much, as far as I’m concerned.
Has it been found? Hint: it’s not climate change.
This is interesting:
the find is important for two reasons: First, Pampaphoneus is the first Paleozoic terrestrial carnivore discovered in South America. Combining this find with earlier discoveries of plant-eaters from the same time frame will help paleontologists “picture a more complete ecosystem during the Permian period,” the statement said.
Second, the skull suggests that this South American species was a close relative to similar dinocephalians previously found in Russia and South Africa. That supports the idea that therapsids were able to disperse easily from one part of the Pangaea supercontinent to the other, during an age when most of Earth’s modern-day land masses were linked together.
Emphasis mine. South America’s a big place, and this is the first time they’ve seen this. It just shows how rare fossils are, and how ridiculous it is for the creationists to demand to see all “transitional species” (a notion that demonstrates nothing except the demander’s ignorance of evolution, because every species is a “transitional” species).