A depressing story about the fecklessness of the State Department and North Korea’s (shocking!) perfidy.
Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?
A depressing story about the fecklessness of the State Department and North Korea’s (shocking!) perfidy.
Unintended Consequences
I’ve never been very thrilled with the idea of converting food to fuel. This article explains why:
President Bush has set a target of replacing 15 percent of domestic gasoline use with biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) during the next 10 years, which would require almost a fivefold increase in mandatory biofuel use, to about 35 billion gallons. With current technology, almost all of this biofuel would have to come from corn because there is no feasible alternative. However, achieving the 15 percent goal would require the entire current US corn crop, which represents a whopping 40 percent of the world’s corn supply. This would do more than create mere market distortions; the irresistible pressure to divert corn from food to fuel would create unprecedented turmoil.
Thus, it is no surprise that the price of corn has doubled in the past year
Asimov 2.0
Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts on updating the Three Laws of Robotics.
Artificial Lunar Lakes
Here’s a cool idea:
Angel, a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, is proposing an enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Using a rotating dish of reflective liquid as its primary mirror, Angel’s telescope would the largest ever built, and would permit astronomers to study the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, including the very first stars.
One thing I don’t get, though. How would you point it? It doesn’t seem like it could be angled up very much out of local horizontal without both messing up the surface shape and requiring higher spin rates. That means that it’s only going to point at the area of the sky corresponding to the current local vertical at the lunar location (presumably they’d want to be on the far side to avoid light interference from the earth). And even then it would take a month to see the whole sky on a swathe, with no ability to go back and take a second look until twenty-eight days later. But if you had a bunch of them scattered all over the far side, you could have a pretty flexible system. This also means you’d have to have data relay satellites, either a constellation in lunar orbits, or a halo around L-2, if you’re going to be able to do earth-based astronomy with it.
As the article notes, this would probably require hand assembly to a large degree, which could provide a lot of motivation for lunar bases and lunar construction workers, and potentially even affordable, as long as you don’t let NASA get involved. It’s the kind of project that demands a lunar infrastructure, for communications as noted above, and habitats. It would be a great way (and perhaps incentive) to industrialize the moon. NSF should tender some bids, and see what the private sector comes up with.
[Via John Hood]
ESAS And Sustainability
The comments are up to close to a hundred over at the original space politics post on the Perils Of ESAS. Al Fansome provides a little useful bit of history:
Playing Outside
Ann Althouse has a post about a byegone day.
I didn’t like playing outside that much myself–I’d always rather stay inside and read a book, but I did have a good time, generally, when I did.
We overtoy our kids. At the risk of sounding like a codger, or worse, Grandpa Simpson (“Let me tell you how it was in my day, sonny”), we used to go over to my grandmother and grandfather’s house to visit. In the basement he had taken a steel rod, bent a handle at one end, and on the other, put a wagon wheel (a children’s wagon, not a Conestoga). He made two of them. One would grip the handle end, and push it up and down the driveway, sidewalk and street, often at high speeds. One would also attempt to do it on the softer lawn, but this was a rapid education in physics.
We used to fight over them. One of them, for reasons long forgotten, was considered superior. We had a great time. And turned out all right, I think, comments from the anonymous loons here notwithstanding.
The Absurdity Of The Immigration “Compromise”
Like abortion, I’m one of those folks who don’t have strong opinions/feelings about immigration, but I think that Mark Steyn makes a great point here:
Is that This-background-check-will-self-destruct-in-24-hours clause for real? If the entire “undocumented” population of, say, Falls Church, Virginia wanders into the local immigration office at 4pm on Monday, the clerks have got till 5pm on Tuesday to find anything on the guys or they’ve got no choice but to issue the Z visa? For the agency that takes the best part of a decade to process nanny applications and which sent Mohammed Atta his visa six months after he’d died, this is, to say the least, a massive cultural change.
If the 24-hour dry-cleaner standard were to be mandated for every government agency, I might reconsider my position. But it seems curious, to put it at its mildest, that only the lucky members of the Undocumented-American community will get to enjoy the benefits of express service from the US government.
Regardless of one’s opinions on immigration, legal or otherwise, we should all be appalled at how such an important issue is being railroaded through the Congress with so little review, or time for it.
The Absurdity Of The Immigration “Compromise”
Like abortion, I’m one of those folks who don’t have strong opinions/feelings about immigration, but I think that Mark Steyn makes a great point here:
Is that This-background-check-will-self-destruct-in-24-hours clause for real? If the entire “undocumented” population of, say, Falls Church, Virginia wanders into the local immigration office at 4pm on Monday, the clerks have got till 5pm on Tuesday to find anything on the guys or they’ve got no choice but to issue the Z visa? For the agency that takes the best part of a decade to process nanny applications and which sent Mohammed Atta his visa six months after he’d died, this is, to say the least, a massive cultural change.
If the 24-hour dry-cleaner standard were to be mandated for every government agency, I might reconsider my position. But it seems curious, to put it at its mildest, that only the lucky members of the Undocumented-American community will get to enjoy the benefits of express service from the US government.
Regardless of one’s opinions on immigration, legal or otherwise, we should all be appalled at how such an important issue is being railroaded through the Congress with so little review, or time for it.
The Absurdity Of The Immigration “Compromise”
Like abortion, I’m one of those folks who don’t have strong opinions/feelings about immigration, but I think that Mark Steyn makes a great point here:
Is that This-background-check-will-self-destruct-in-24-hours clause for real? If the entire “undocumented” population of, say, Falls Church, Virginia wanders into the local immigration office at 4pm on Monday, the clerks have got till 5pm on Tuesday to find anything on the guys or they’ve got no choice but to issue the Z visa? For the agency that takes the best part of a decade to process nanny applications and which sent Mohammed Atta his visa six months after he’d died, this is, to say the least, a massive cultural change.
If the 24-hour dry-cleaner standard were to be mandated for every government agency, I might reconsider my position. But it seems curious, to put it at its mildest, that only the lucky members of the Undocumented-American community will get to enjoy the benefits of express service from the US government.
Regardless of one’s opinions on immigration, legal or otherwise, we should all be appalled at how such an important issue is being railroaded through the Congress with so little review, or time for it.