The glove challenge has been won.
This has been a problem for my entire career, and was one of the first issues that I worked on out of college. But I think we made more progress on it in the last three years than we have in the three decades prior, because we finally put the right incentives in place. I hope that this will be a big boost for the prize concept in general. Congratulations to the winner, and to Ken Davidian and Brant Sponberg.
Lileks has (among other things) a tribute to Wally.
I’m hearing rumors that Wally Schirra died last night.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, apparently Keith heard it on CNN as well.
So, Grissom, Slayton, Schirra, Shepard are gone. Besides Glenn, who’s still with us?
[googling]
OK, Cooper is dead, so it’s just Glenn and Carpenter. They could hold a reunion in a phone booth. And I see that Wikipedia has already updated the Mercury 7 page to reflect Schirra’s passing.
[Update at 12:30 PM EDT]
Here’s the obit from CNN.
Hadn’t thought about that, but it’s true, he was the only astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
…at the New York Post–he’s falling down on the job. They could have taken that alliterative headline to the mth degree: “MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE MOVIE MIFFS MORMON MITT.”
We’ll just starve all those pesky Asians:
…the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting this week in Bangkok concludes that rice production was a main cause of rising methane emissions in the 20th century. It calls for better controls.
“There is no other crop that is emitting such a large amount of greenhouse gases,” said Reiner Wassmann, a climate change specialist at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
…that every bloggist should know.
Donald Sensing, on the absurd mental gymnastics that Democrats must perform to want to end a war that doesn’t exist. As he says, one side can start a war, but it takes both to end it. And Al Qaeda, either in Afghanistan or Iraq, isn’t ready to quit. Particularly when, based on the actions of the Dems, they think they’re winning.
Donald Sensing, on the absurd mental gymnastics that Democrats must perform to want to end a war that doesn’t exist. As he says, one side can start a war, but it takes both to end it. And Al Qaeda, either in Afghanistan or Iraq, isn’t ready to quit. Particularly when, based on the actions of the Dems, they think they’re winning.
Donald Sensing, on the absurd mental gymnastics that Democrats must perform to want to end a war that doesn’t exist. As he says, one side can start a war, but it takes both to end it. And Al Qaeda, either in Afghanistan or Iraq, isn’t ready to quit. Particularly when, based on the actions of the Dems, they think they’re winning.
This seems like kind of a strange symposium:
There is a growing debate among conservative thinkers and pundits about whether Darwinian theory helps or harms conservatism and its public policy agenda. Some have argued forcefully that Darwin’s theory provides support for conservative positions on family life, economics, bioethics, and other issues, while others have countered that the effort to justify conservative policy positions on Darwinian grounds is fundamentally flawed. Does Darwin’s theory help defend or undermine traditional morality and family life? Does it encourage or discredit economic freedom? Is it a spur or a brake to utopian schemes to re-engineer human nature?
Doesn’t it matter whether or not the theory is valid? Is it only something to be discussed in terms of its effects on conservatism (or for that matter progressivism)? If it turns out that it somehow is harmful to traditional morality and family life (I’m not sure that the empirical evidence bears this out, even if it does in theory), does that mean that it shouldn’t be taught in science classes, even if it’s the best scientific explanation for the fossil record (and human behavior)? What is the point of this symposium?