Rich Lowry has read his book. So, with an even more devastating review, has Christopher Hitchens. In a rational and well-read world, he wouldn’t be being lionized by the media. But in the real, Bush-deranged world, he probably will continue to be.
Ouch
I’m showing up on the first page of a Google search for “rosie o’donnell,” under “Blog Postings” (at least for now–Google is fickle).
As the first one. Behold, the power of the Instalink.
Sounds Like It Just Sucks
You know, this space tourism thing will just be a fad:
“It’s not really like being weightless in water,” she said. “Water has its own weight. You’re still experiencing something like a pressure. But this is the feeling of no pressure.” Going weightless made her realize “how rarely we experience an entirely new physical sensation over your whole body, and that was just so different. I couldn’t have really anticipated what it would feel like.”
In fact, she said, it wasn’t until she got back on the ground that she “understood the magic” of the experience. “It was like I had gained this momentary super power that I couldn’t access any more. I felt like I should be able to just launch off the ground and go flying across the hotel lobby.”
I was going to respond to the first comment here, but Brian Swiderski beat me to it. I wish that more of his comments were helpful and civil, like most of his comments on space policy, and fewer (in fact, none) of them on other topics the product of obvious Bush Derangement. Unfortunately, the ratio is the other way around.
However, when commenter “kayawanee” writes that:
While it’s true that there is no further acceleration due to gravity, it’s really inaccurate to say that the skydiver is no longer in free fall once he achieves terminal velocity. Afterall, any object in orbit is considered to be in a perpetual state of freefall, even if (really, especially because) that object is at a constant velocity.
This is clearly (OK, well, not so clearly, or obviously) wrong, which gets back to the previous post on free fall.
Part of the confusion arises from the word “velocity,” and the rest from the special case of a circular orbit.
[Sigh]
The whole reason that I stipulated that the orbit was circular in the previous post was because I didn’t want to open up this new can of worms. I promise that I’ll finish this post, but I have to go stir some chili, and I don’t want people to be misled in the meantime.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, back from chili stirring (and adding various ingredients to make it more chili-like).
The first issue is simple. Velocity is not speed. Velocity is a vector, and has a directional component. Speed is the scalar of that vector, that represents only the magnitude. Example: going fifty miles per hour east is a vector, going fifty miles per hour is a speed. When one runs in a circular race track at a constant speed (say, 120 mph) the speed is constant, but the vector is continuously changing (with a constant acceleration directed toward the center of the track, otherwise the car wouldn’t be turning). So even if the speed doesn’t change, there is similarly an acceleration in orbit as well.
Here’s where it gets even more complicated. In a non-circular earth orbit, both speed and velocity are changing, because at apogee (the highest point of the orbit), speed is low, but altitude is high, whereas at perigee, it’s the opposite. But in both cases, and all cases in between, the body is in free fall. And the energy of the orbit is constant throughout (thus maintaining Newton’s laws). Free fall simply means that there are no forces acting on the body other than gravity.
In a parabolic aircraft, the only reason that the inhabitants of the airplane are in free fall is because the pilot is flying the trajectory that would apply if there were no atmosphere (that is, he is compensating for the air drag with the thrust of the engines). He is in fact flying an orbit that, if continued, would intersect the earth. In fact, it’s useful to think of the airplane as “flying around” the free fall of the passengers, so that it doesn’t cause an impact with them. He doesn’t continue it, and pulls out after half a minute or so (for subsonic aircraft) for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Indoctrinate U
Stanley Kurtz has a review of Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary on political correctness run amok on college campuses:
I was struck by the scientist who said that her students were able to figure out her politics simply by noting what she did not say. Just by teaching her subject, without adding extraneous leftist political harangues, she had revealed herself to be a closet Republican. You won
A Gay Leftist Latin Leader Line Dance
Not that that’s a bad thing. Also known as “Cinco de Pinko.”
At Free Republic. The comments are a hoot:
Or A Vasectomy, Either
Note to self: should the need unfortunately arise, tell the surgeon that I don’t want him to do my colostomy this way.
Either way, I suspect that you’ll still pay through the nose.
Lazy (And Rude) Commenters
It took the fortieth commenter in this post to tell me that the first link was broken. As I note there, it simply confirms my long-standing observation that many commenters here respond only to what I write or excerpt, without troubling themselves to go read what I’m basing my comments on. For instance, Bill White didn’t respond at all, instead using the opportunity to grab my bandwidth and disk space, and my readers’ eyeballs, to post and link to blather from Barack Obama.
Often, of course, people who do this make fools of themselves, when I link to a satirical piece, because they don’t have any idea what I linked to, instead just responding to the opposite of my point.
Here’s a suggestion for everyone. Read more, and comment less, until you actually know what you’re commenting about, and have had time to give it a little thought.
George Tenet
One of the things that I’ve long criticized George Bush for was keeping so many losers on from the Clinton administration, Tenet being foremost, but Norm Mineta another. In the case of Tenet, it isn’t clear if this was part of “changing the tone in Washington,” or misplaced loyalty to a family friend. (Dan Goldin was yet another, but at least there he had the excuse that it’s hard to find a NASA administrator, not to mention the fact that he’d been appointed by his father.) Either way, it was a disaster.
Sunday night, Tenet gave the impression that any thought of Saddam and al Qaeda
The One-Percent Solution
Eric Hedman thinks that there’s nothing wrong with the space program that can’t be solved with more money.
Sorry, no sale here. Even if it were possible to increase NASA’s budget by over fifty percent in the current political climate, all it would mean is more waste, less motivation to do things smart, and less pressure on them to rely on commercial suppliers. It wouldn’t result in more cost effective space activities, which are what are required to open up the frontier. Until the people developing space systems are spending their own money, as XCOR, SpaceX, Armadillo and others are, we’ll continue to get pork-based solutions, with little resembling innovation, in which success of the mission itself is, at best, a secondary goal.
[Update at 11:30]
Oh, and Mark? There’s no such word as “enfusion.”
Get Firefox. It has a spell checquer built in.
Just Heard On Fox
After a story about cave-man (and woman) sex (“So easy, a cave man can do it!”): “Now back to serious news–American Idol.”
Oh, Megyn, you used to sound so smart before you started doing that morning show.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, on reflection, maybe she was being tongue in cheek. I’d certainly like to think so.
[Update a minute or so later]
Actually, now that I think about it some more, I just like to think about her tongue in a cheek. Maybe even mine.
But I probably shouldn’t have thoughts like that. I’m quite confident that my darling Patricia wouldn’t approve. Nor should she.
Nope. Not thinking about that at all.