The 2007 Darwin nominees. Found among a lot of other odd links, including the strangest mating habits of animals.
Scott Ott Is Brilliant
I wish I’d thought of this. He tells Hillary that it took men to give women the vote.
Lost Art Found
Some news from late last week that I’d missed–a previously unheard early recording of The Beatles has been discovered.
This 15 track set was recorded at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany a short while after the Ted Taylor recordings and boast different and perhaps better takes of “A Taste of Honey” and “Hippy Hippy Shake” (using Tony Sheridan as a 5th Beatle). These are the only two songs found on the original Star Club releases with which this recording should not be confused.
This is an historical recording because it was the very first time that Ringo Starr actually played with The Beatles “live” after replacing Pete Best on the drums.
Other tracks make good use of Kingsize Taylor’s Band “The Dominoes” who utilize their piano on such Beatles favorites as “Money,” “Twist and Shout” and “I Saw Her Standing There” all of which were subsequently used on The Beatles’ first studio recordings for E.M.I.
What makes this album truly unique are the eight songs not available on any previously released L.P.s or singles — which include Paul McCartney singing Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” and George Harrison vocalizing Maurice Williams’ “Do You Believe.” One of the most outstanding tracks on this album must be “Ask Me Why” showing just how John Lennon and Paul McCartney became such a winning combination.
Wonder how long until the download is available?
Debating Human Spaceflight
I interviewed Steven Weinberg who has replaced James Van Allen as the most prestigious and eloquent direct critic of human spaceflight (unlike Barack Obama who may be the most effective passive-aggressive de-funder of space activities since Nixon).
I faced a fundamental media ethics issue. Weinberg’s opinion on the likelihood of nuclear war with Russia in the next twenty years (“more likely than not”) puts him in a tiny minority. By publicizing his view on this, it delegitimizes him as a spokesman against human spaceflight without discrediting directly his arguments against human spaceflight on the merits. I chose to carefully transcribe his words on this point, confirm that he stood by them, then released them.
What would you have done?
Four Years On
Four years ago, President Bush announced a new direction for the nation in space, perhaps the biggest space policy change since the end of Apollo, in that it forthrightly declared that there was now a national goal to send people beyond low earth orbit, where they had been stuck since 1972, a situation that was cemented with the onset of the Shuttle era, because it was our only crewed space vehicle, and it could go nowhere else.
Unfortunately, four years later, the program is bogged down with an unnecessary new launch system that will do little to improve safety and nothing to reduce costs, and for this and other reasons, it seems unlikely to survive the next administration, almost regardless of who wins. My primary hope is that at least the goal remain in place, and perhaps some fresh thought will be given to how it will be best achieved, with a lot more emphasis on the commercial sector and tying it in to national security, as the Aldridge Report advised, and NASA has completely ignored. And no, COTS doesn’t count, both because it’s inadequately funded, and because it has nothing to do with VSE–it’s simply a way to replace Shuttle logistics for ISS.
Jeff Foust has some thoughts over at The Space Review today. Here’s what I wrote as I live blogged the speech at the time, from a motel in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea.
Cranking Out Code Monkeys
I’d been wondering about this. Apparently, computer “science” degrees are no longer teaching computer science. There’s no doubt that there isn’t as much demand for actual CS types as there is for programmers, but if that’s the case, they should shrink the CS departments and start up a different one, perhaps called computer applications, to teach the programmers. As it is now, I’d consider it academic fraud.
This is a generic problem, to me. The word “science” has gotten too watered down, even (especially?) in academia. Of course, it all started when someone came up with the oxymoronic major, political science…
“Who Says Nothing Exciting Ever Happens In Canada?”
That’s Joe Katzman’s comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.
…the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet’s multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: “at least 35 genera of the continent’s mammals went extinct
“Who Says Nothing Exciting Ever Happens In Canada?”
That’s Joe Katzman’s comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.
…the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet’s multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: “at least 35 genera of the continent’s mammals went extinct
“Who Says Nothing Exciting Ever Happens In Canada?”
That’s Joe Katzman’s comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.
…the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet’s multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: “at least 35 genera of the continent’s mammals went extinct
So, What’s The Catch?
This seems like a pretty big breakthrough.
Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock