Space

Exodus Day

This weekend Jews celebrate Passover and Christians celebrate Easter. The latter holiday has its roots in the former as the Last Supper was a Passover feast. Christians celebrate Jesus being seen alive following his crucifiction and subsequently ascending to heaven, the Jews celebrate Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt to the promised land.

The ultimate Earthly oppressor is not Pharoah or Rome, but gravity. This month, my web site, Space-Shot.com took steps to throw off the yoke of gravity. For $3.50 the myriads can compete in a tournament to win a trip to space. If they don’t win, they help someone else do so.

It does not take divine intervention, a miracle or ten plagues to get people into space, just a creative web site. (Albeit praying for a change in the weather can’t hurt.) Now people of all means can ascend to space and soon can reach the planets and the stars.

Let my people go to space!

General

New Orleans Report

I took my daughter on an air and ground tour of New Orleans yesterday to teach her about the largest man-made disaster in the United States since Richmond was destroyed by the Union Army in the 1860s. A lot has changed since August, but much is still to do.

In my tour, I saw that there were many blue tarps dotting the city’s residential sections representing rooves that had not yet been repaired. Many swimming pools in flooded sections were still filled with filth and were completely black from the air. Some sections of town had huge trash piles in front of every house. Trash hauling continues, but my pilot said this generated 30 years worth of trash. One January estimate said extraordinary hauling will continue through Thanksgiving 2006.

Certain sections of town had indications of water levels on the walls that spoke of completely ruining first floors throughout the area. Demolition and gutting of savable structures is starting, but many buildings have not yet had their first floor material removed.

My driver told me an uncorroborated story about gang violence that was darker than the standard reports in the media. Rather than the disorganized food desperation and opportunistic looting that we were led to believe, there was a gang takeover of some buildings and some portions of the city. To stem the tide, there were mercenaries patrolling the streets that had been advised to use lethal force and had to.

The air tour company’s, Southern Seaplane’s, pilot said that they were one of very few companies doing air tours and that demand was only one or two tours a week and they spent most of their time ferrying petroleum employees. That suggests only a few hundred people have seen first hand the devastation of the wake of Hurricane Katrina and hubris. The pilot says he sees it every day and is numb to it.

For those that can’t afford a $500 air tour, there is a Gray Line bus tour for $35 called “The Hurricane Katrina Tour: America’s Worst Catastrophe”. People have mixed feelings about the tour but the plusses are it brings revenue to the city and helps witness an event that we should not try to repeat.

One thing that was particularly poignant in the air tour was the closed Jazz Land Six Flags amusement park. After the tour, my seven-year-old daughter called her Mom on my cell phone and said, “we just saw hurricane devastation, but let me tell you about the oyster shell I found”. It may take her and the nation decades to process this disaster. I am not so lucky and already get it.

Technology and Society

Tissue Engineering

I remember reading about this technique, using inkjet technology for constructing artificial organs, a few years ago. It’s starting to pay off:

Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. “After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner,” says Forgacs.

The future may be here sooner than we think. And it makes things like Larry Niven’s concern about people harvesting corpsickles for body parts seem pretty silly.

War Commentary

No Sense Of Humor

Think of this next time someone says that George Bush has “destroyed civil liberties” in this country:

“While the outcome of the recent arrests in connection with SMS messaging is not clear yet, what is certain is that SMS jokes have already put some people into serious trouble,” wrote the website Rooz Online.

The clampdown is in line with the authorities’ uncompromising stance on the internet and bloggers. Wary of modern communications as a means of spreading political dissent, Iran is second only to China in the number of websites it filters – using technology made in America.

Large numbers of the nation’s estimated 70,000 to 100,000 bloggers have faced harassment or imprisonment. The regime has acknowledged monitoring text message traffic. It first admitted it had access to text traffic last December when a military plane carrying more than 100 journalists crashed shortly after take-off at Tehran airport.

Science And Society

A Rare Editorial

From Paul Hsieh, on global warming.

I don’t expect this one blog post to immediately change many minds on this contentious issue. For now, I’d be satisfied with making the point that the issue is not the simple slam-dunk as is typically portrayed in the usual news media. Nor are the opponents of global warming hypothesis/Kyoto treaty necessarily stupid or corrupt.

Philosophy

Mazel Tov

For those lacking patience, I give you the two-minute Haggadah.

Speaking of children: We hid some matzoh. Whoever finds it gets five bucks.

The story of Passover: It’s a long time ago. We’re slaves in Egypt. Pharaoh is a nightmare. We cry out for help. God brings plagues upon the Egyptians. We escape, bake some matzoh. God parts the Red Sea. We make it through; the Egyptians aren’t so lucky. We wander 40 years in the desert, eat manna, get the Torah, wind up in Israel, get a new temple, enjoy several years without being persecuted again. (Let brisket cool now.)

Happy Passover.

[via Joe Katzman]

Space

Welcome To The Conspiracy, Mark

I guess it’s time to give Mark Whittington the secret decoder ring, and initiate him into the Secret Brotherhood of Internet Rocketeers:

Clearly recent experience teaches us that simply telling the current NASA to go forth and build a lunar base is the last thing anyone would want to do. For NASA the construction of a lunar base would be the work of decades and at least tens of billions of dollars. If you like how NASA has managed the International Space Station, you

Media Criticism

No Media Bias Here

For a textbook case, let’s dissect this story, from the San Francisco Chronicle. Start with the hed:

Democrat leads in bid to claim GOP House seat

Rep. Cunningham was convicted of taking bribes

Note that it’s a two parter. The first is about the election, the other is old news, but it never hurts to remind the readers that, you know, Republicans Are Corrupt. It’s that old “culture of corruption” thing (recall that this is Nancy Pelosi’s hometown rag).

Now while it’s true that the Democrat got more votes than anyone else in the race, it’s misleading, because it gives you no hint as to what will actually happen in the election in June, but you’d think from the headline that the Dem is the front runner. Here’s the real story, buried about halfway down:

Busby, a Cardiff school board member and daughter of an Italian sausagemaker, received 44 percent of the vote by spotlighting a proposed ethics policy that would bar lawmakers from secretly meeting, taking money or accepting gifts from lobbyists, “no exceptions.”

The Republican vote was divided among 14 GOP candidates, with Bilbray finishing with 15 percent of the vote, about 900 votes ahead of Roach, according to election-night figures.

Emphasis mine.

In other words, the one Democrat running in the race could only muster 44% of the vote. Unless she can somehow persuade seven percent of the district electorate (or at least of those voting in this election) that are Republicans to vote for her instead of the eventual Republican candidate, she doesn’t have a prayer of winning, despite the implication of the headline. That 44% is her max, unless they can somehow increase donkey turnout, and decrease Republican. But the readers of the Chron have to figure this out, because the paper is not only not going to tell them, it’s going to attempt to imply that she actually has a chance.

Of course, this kind of cocooning is exactly why the Dems continue to lose each election, and be chronically (pun intended) disappointed–they continue to overhype their chances to their base, both from the official party organization and from their accomplices in the newsrooms.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!