Aleta Jackson writes that XCOR’s EZ-Rocket flew home to Mojave today, piloted by Rick Searfoss, from its record-breaking trip to California City. It finished its taxi to the hangar the same way it took off–under rocket power.
It was apparently its last journey. It’s now achieved (and probably exceeded) all of its original technical and marketing objectives, and its final destination is now a well-deserved display area in an aviation and space museum.
Economist reports that video conferencing kinks are being worked out of both the experience and the business model. Corporations are getting on board. $1.75/minute on peak, $0.25 off peak? If it is being used “around the clock” as they say, average price would be only $0.50/minute or if only during business hours 40 hours/wk at $2/minute. Paying $3000 hard costs for four hours ($12.5/minute) of on site business meetings the past two days myself, I sure would like it if I could cut travel by 75%. The calculation is more extreme if you assign labor cost to travel. If you throw in my 16 hours of travel at $2/minute you get up to over $20/minute for these face-to-face meetings.
Gateway Pundit has a roundup on the Iraqi elections, which are reportedly going smoothly, with little violence, despite Zarqawi’s threats. Even the BBC is impressed.
It seems to be a bi-partisan effort.
The level of my disgust with politicians in Washington continues to plumb new depths.
Former Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, long-time nemesis of NASA, and budget hawk (something that we could use a lot more of, these days, though he always made an exception for dairy price supports), has apparently died.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the story. I hadn’t realized that he suffered from Alzheimers. At least his suffering is over.
The part of multi-culturalism that the left doesn’t want to talk about:
Four days after he set foot in Australia, the rape spree began. And during his sexual assault trial in a New South Wales courtroom, the Pakistani man began to berate one of his tearful 14-year-old victims because she had the temerity to shake her head at his testimony.
But she had every reason to express her disgust. After taking an oath on the Qur
Out of the Cradle has a list of books for space enthusiasts (though they mostly seem to be for moon enthusiasts).
Robert Bakker says that King Kong wouldn’t be able to get enough to eat.
There are more serious issues than that. Even if he could get enough to eat, for a body with that much mass to move that fast, the heat generated would be much greater than could be radiated out through the skin (mass goes up as the cube of the major dimension, whereas surface area only goes up as the square), particularly through that fur coat, so he’d cook from the inside if he maintained the kind of activity levels presumably depicted. Also, he wouldn’t be able to maintain his own weight on those (relatively) spindly legs, once scaled up to that size–they’d splinter like toothpicks.
No point in seeing the movie, folks–it’s just not realistic…
[Via Mark Whittington]
Robert Bakker says that King Kong wouldn’t be able to get enough to eat.
There are more serious issues than that. Even if he could get enough to eat, for a body with that much mass to move that fast, the heat generated would be much greater than could be radiated out through the skin (mass goes up as the cube of the major dimension, whereas surface area only goes up as the square), particularly through that fur coat, so he’d cook from the inside if he maintained the kind of activity levels presumably depicted. Also, he wouldn’t be able to maintain his own weight on those (relatively) spindly legs, once scaled up to that size–they’d splinter like toothpicks.
No point in seeing the movie, folks–it’s just not realistic…
[Via Mark Whittington]
Robert Bakker says that King Kong wouldn’t be able to get enough to eat.
There are more serious issues than that. Even if he could get enough to eat, for a body with that much mass to move that fast, the heat generated would be much greater than could be radiated out through the skin (mass goes up as the cube of the major dimension, whereas surface area only goes up as the square), particularly through that fur coat, so he’d cook from the inside if he maintained the kind of activity levels presumably depicted. Also, he wouldn’t be able to maintain his own weight on those (relatively) spindly legs, once scaled up to that size–they’d splinter like toothpicks.
No point in seeing the movie, folks–it’s just not realistic…
[Via Mark Whittington]