The perceived political weakness of the United States, and the expectation that the Democrats would seek a strategic retreat, may have persuaded the Khomeinist leadership that Ahmadinejad may be right after all: the Islamic Republic can pursue a hegemonic strategy with no fear of hitting something hard.
Ahmadinejad, reported to watch a lot of CNN, has seen the gunboats sail in. But he has also seen Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha, Barrack Obama, and other American luminaries such as Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda who would rather see Bush destroyed than the mullahs restrained. The American gunboat ballet does not impress the radicals in the ascendancy in Tehran. And that is bad news for all concerned, above all the people of the region.
Cathy Booth Thomas has a fairly comprehensive overview of the space tourism industry at Time Magazine. I didn’t see any mistakes in it, except I’m not sure what she means about Dreamchaser being Russian derived. I thought that it was based on the HL-20. That vehicle was inspired by a Russian design, but she probably should have mentioned the Langley heritage.
Alan Boyle has a fascinating exclusive interview with Bob Bigelow, who seems to be planning to homestead EML-1 privately. I’m glad that someone’s going to do it, since NASA seems determined to ignore it, despite its many potential advantages. He seems primarily interested in it as an assembly point for building a lunar base that can then be dropped to the surface in one piece, avoiding lunar surface assembly issues. But I suspect that once he starts doing it, there will probably be permanent infrastructure there as well.
[Update at 10:30 AM EST]
In the face of continuing progress in the private sector such as described above, Clark Lindsey once again questions NASA’s priorities.
The answer, of course, comes down to pork. Bigelow won’t provide/maintain jobs in the right congressional districts.
Computers are already better than humans at chess (and I can recall a time, back in the eighties, when there were predictions that this would never happen, or at least not for many decades), but they still don’t do that well at Go.
Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn.
“On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player,” said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ computing lab SZTAKI.
The 19 by 19 board which top players use is still hard for a machine, but the new method is promising because it makes better use of the growing power of computers than earlier Go software.
An Iraqi sheikh who doesn’t want to make the same mistake the Vietnamese did:
“One thing Sheikh Sattar keeps saying is he wants al-Anbar to be like Germany and Japan and South Korea were after their respective wars, with a long-term American presence helping … put them back together,” MacFarland said. “The negative example he cites is Vietnam. He says, yeah, so, Vietnam beat the Americans, and what did it get them? You know, 30 years later, they
An Iraqi sheikh who doesn’t want to make the same mistake the Vietnamese did:
“One thing Sheikh Sattar keeps saying is he wants al-Anbar to be like Germany and Japan and South Korea were after their respective wars, with a long-term American presence helping … put them back together,” MacFarland said. “The negative example he cites is Vietnam. He says, yeah, so, Vietnam beat the Americans, and what did it get them? You know, 30 years later, they
An Iraqi sheikh who doesn’t want to make the same mistake the Vietnamese did:
“One thing Sheikh Sattar keeps saying is he wants al-Anbar to be like Germany and Japan and South Korea were after their respective wars, with a long-term American presence helping … put them back together,” MacFarland said. “The negative example he cites is Vietnam. He says, yeah, so, Vietnam beat the Americans, and what did it get them? You know, 30 years later, they