Clark Lindsey notes an encouraging trend in discussion about space:
…both Bezos and Musk (in other articles) cite the long term goal of space settlement as one of the primary motivations for their projects. In the past year I’ve seen a rise in the visibility and credibility of space settlement as a motivation for human spaceflight rather than simply exploration and science.
About time.
…all my Christian readers, that is. The rest of you can go suck eggs. Or enjoy the holiday anyway, as I will. And my very best wishes are reserved for those in “the sandbox,” trying to help make a better Middle East, at the potential cost of their lives and limbs, and at the definite cost of a holiday at home with their families.
And to all a good night.
[Note: this message will be on top for a while, so don’t let that stop you from scrolling down to look for any potential new content. On the other hand, there probably won’t be a lot under the circumstances…]
[Update a few minutes later]
All right, happy Channukah to my Jewish readers as well, though we all know that it’s a pretty minor holiday as Jewish holidays go, and none of us goyim would pay any attention at all if it hadn’t been set up as an alternative to Christmas so the Jewish kids wouldn’t feel left out.
And as for Kwanza…please. Well, OK. If I have any readers who actually celebrate it, have a good one.
And to heck with you Festivus people. Get a non-nihilistic religion.
No, Thomas, your experience is not atypical, at least going by me. I’ve never, ever received a rebate.
I no longer take them seriously, or even bother to send them in. If it worked once in a while, I might bother, but it’s gotten to the point that it’s not worth the time and hassle on an expected-value basis, even when it’s fifty bucks or so. If the price is worth it without the rebate, I buy it, if not, then I don’t. But I never factor in the rebate any more in the purchase decision, unless it’s instant in the store. I wish that they’d stop this fraud.
Lileks has a depressing Christmas radio newscast from sixty-one years ago. The cause was clearly hopeless. Why didn’t we just give up?
Lileks has a depressing Christmas radio newscast from sixty-one years ago. The cause was clearly hopeless. Why didn’t we just give up?
Lileks has a depressing Christmas radio newscast from sixty-one years ago. The cause was clearly hopeless. Why didn’t we just give up?
They’ve sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth. I think we’re going to see one walking around in a few years.
Things are progressing nicely:
“We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel de-vices and applications.”
Alan Boyle has a useful wrapup. It would have been hard to top 2004 for an exciting year for private space, but things are moving slowly but steadily toward the day that we open up the frontier, with or without government help.
Any HD geeks out there?
I’m looking at this television, which is on sale at Costco for less than a grand.
It looks good, but I found this one review that’s giving me a little heartburn, because we have DirecTV, and planned to upgrade to a triple LNB dish and new HD TIVO receiver.
It is an excellent set for HD OTA and regular definition satellite receiver. But I recently upgraded to an HD receiver for DirecTV and found out it doesn’t have the capability to keep up with the HD satellite receiver. There is a phenomena called macroblocking that occurs since the digital picture cannot be translated properly. Defined – it is an awful picture on the 480i channels, which means about 95 of my programs looked awful.
I searched all over the web, and couldn’t find any other reference to this problem. Is it a real one, or is this an isolated problem for this one reviewer, either because (s)he didn’t understand how to set it up, or there was something defective about that unit?