Lileks discusses a major decision at his newspaper:
Everyone was casting votes on new comics to replace Boondocks. It
WMD Mystery Solved?
This young man thinks so. Of course, here’s the key question:
Glazov: So if all this evidence is credible, why wouldn’t the Bush Administration take advantage of this information?
Mauro: There are multiple ideas out there. I tend to believe that the foreign policy implications of these revelations explain the Administration
Good Guys And Bad Guys
Tibor Machan writes that Hollywood only finds villains nuanced when they’re anti-American:
Let us not forget that most of the writers and producers in Hollywood — the ones who make a quintessential American institution, namely, business, look so terrible in their various vehicles — are politically sympathetic with the Left. They have been that for a long time. (Even today, after the true nature of communists has been clearly demonstrated — based on, among other things, KGB and similar archives — there is still far more hostility shown from much of Hollywood against Joe McCarthy than against Joe Stalin — for instance, in George Clooney’s movie, “Good Night and Good Luck”.)
No, there is no sudden discovery of subtlety and complexity within the minds of evil people by Hollywood writers and producers. Rather what we have here is apologetics, plain and simple. The folks who put out this stuff just cannot work up a genuine disgust of terrorists because, well, most of the terrorists share their anti-American point of view. That seems to suffice for them to place most terrorism — which, one must keep in mind, consists primarily of killing people who are innocent, among them civilians and many children, and whose only “crime” is to be Americans or Westerners, meaning, they belong to the tribe the terrorists want to wipe out — into a sympathetic light.
An Existence Proof
Clark Lindsey sees some reason for hope that the new rocket companies may be able to achieve their cost (and business) goals. It would be interesting to see what conventional aerospace costing models would have predicted for RDT&E and ops costs for a government Eclipse program. We have to break out of the cost-plus culture, and ESAS does nothing toward that end.
Lost Secrets
This is cool.
Some of the Enigma messages were never broken. Now, you can contribute some CPU cycles to attempting to crack the last ones.
Actually, I think I know one of them. I’ll bet it’s “DON’T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE.”
Not As Smart As The Gipper
Remember the shrink who claimed that Ronald Reagan had diminished mental capacity as early as 1980? Well, even at his worst, the former president never fell for a Nigerian email scam:
Guy Gottschalk is asking a judge to remove his father as administrator of the $8-million family partnership that was set up for tax purposes after the death of his mother in 1993. A hearing is set for March 14.
The suit alleges that Louis Gottschalk destroyed bank records to cover up the amount of his losses.
“While it seems unlikely, even ludicrous, that a highly educated doctor like [Gottschalk] would fall prey to such an obvious con, that is exactly what happened,” wrote Guy Gottschalk’s attorney in court papers.
Customer Feedback
Jesse Londin has a good overview of the public (mostly industry) comments to the FAA-AST NPRM on suborbital launch regulations. This is an issue that I’m a little concerned about:
Along with the comments filed by the Peronal Spaceflight Federation, Pat Hoar for Space Adventures, offered a few additional thoughts; and with regard to the FAA’s statement “The FAA does not expect orbital commercial human space flight to occur in the immediate future” Pat specified: “Space Adventures notes that it has sent three space flight participants to the International Space Station since 2001 with additional orbital space flight participants currently in training. Space Adventures assumes that the FAA intended to say ‘
Whither The Enlightenment?
Phil Bowermaster has a couple of interesting and related book reviews. The Angosphere Challenge
An Arab Lunar Mission?
I doubt if it will kick off a space race with Arabia, though. Mark Whittington will be disappointed again.
Chocolate, Veggies And Health
Some interesting research results:
Hollenberg’s follow-up work, reported in the PNAS paper, confirms that the islanders also have far larger exposures to cocoa flavanols. Tests showed that flavanol-residue concentrations in urine were six times as high in the islanders as in the mainlanders.
At the Cocoa Symposium, Hollenberg reported that dramatic long-term benefits may be attributable to the islanders’ cocoa habit: Their death rate from heart disease is less than 8 percent of that in Kuna mainlanders, and cancer kills only 16 percent as many islanders. The two populations were matched for age, weight, and a number of other factors that might affect heart and cancer risks.
Hollenberg concludes that the Kuna epidemiological data, although preliminary, “indicate that a flavanol-rich diet may provide an extraordinary benefit in the reduction of the two deadliest diseases in today’s world.”
Pretty impressive. Unfortunately, it turns out that, while dark chocolate is in theory good for your heart and helps fight cancer, the manufacturing process tends to destroy the particular flavonoids that confer the benefits. Hopefully, now that they know this, Hersheys et al can figure out how to make a healthier chocolate that still tastes good.
[Via Geek Press]