Provo, Utah, doesn’t have to worry about cats and dogs living together. It’s illegal.
I wonder what the rationale was for this dumb law?
Provo, Utah, doesn’t have to worry about cats and dogs living together. It’s illegal.
I wonder what the rationale was for this dumb law?
Provo, Utah, doesn’t have to worry about cats and dogs living together. It’s illegal.
I wonder what the rationale was for this dumb law?
Philip Chaston reports on a talk in London by Aubrey De Grey, in which he announced that the Methuselah Mouse prize is being extended to another one for best late-onset treatment, for those of us too old to benefit from breakthroughs that must be started early in life.
But only because he left behind a young daughter. Otherwise, this man, who accidentally killed himself with an exploding lava lamp, would be a contendah…
“It wasn’t bubbling fast enough for him,” his mom guesses. “Because when we walked in the stove was on at the lowest setting.”
Charles Rousseaux describes the story, little discussed in the press, of the president’s and Congress’ visionary support for the new space age, both NASA’s and the private sector’s. And Ken Silber talks about the outer solar system.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of the outer solar system, here’s a beautiful shot of Saturn’s rings and its moon Mimas from Cassini, courtesy of NASA Watch.
I think that for honeymoon destinations, the rings will be the late twenty-first century equivalent of Niagara Falls.
Check it out.
Jeff Foust has an interesting column at The Space Review today about use of the word “tourist” to apply to private citizens traveling into space.
Unlike Rick Tumlinson, I’ve never minded the term all that much–it captures a lot of what we’re trying to accomplish in a single word, and clearly differentiates it from the NASA astronaut paradigm. And as Jeff points out, it’s easier to criticize it than to come up with an alternative that people will readily use. In the nineties, when Dan Goldin’s NASA could be cajoled or pressured into paying any attention to the subject at all, they resisted using the word, preferring the phrase “public space travel.”
But Jeff makes a point that I’d never previously considered. If the resistance to the new launch legislation allowing space passenger travel without heavy FAA regulation for passenger safety arose from the use of the word, perhaps we do need to come up with substitute, at least in a formal sense. Clearly, the early flights for the next few years are not going to be for the masses, expecting airline-like safety, but if Reps DeFazio and Oberstar had the mistaken impression that they were, due to the t-word, it may be time to give it more thought.
How about “space adventurer”?
Go check out this comment on my TechCentralStation piece on the relative merits of John Kerry and George W. Bush’s space policy (it’s the first one by “jen larson,” in case others have been put up since I published this post).
Costs of the robotic Hubble repair mission have been skyrocketing.
The estimated price tag of a robotic rescue mission — between $1 billion and $2 billion — is raising eyebrows and questions about whether Hubble is worth the investment amid tight budgets and periodic reports of technical woes that could cripple the spacecraft before the robot gets there.
I’ve never taken this mission seriously. I don’t think that NASA ever really intended to do it. The initial studies were just a fig leaf to distract attention from the fact that they weren’t willing to send a Shuttle to it, and assuage Hubble fans. The problem that they have now is that just safely deorbiting the thing is going to be impossible to do for a reasonable amount of money. I still think they should do the Shuttle servicing mission, because the marginal cost of that is the absolute cheapest thing they can do, and the risk is overblown (though even if it’s as dangerous as some think, it’s still one of the few things that Shuttle could do that would actually be useful).
By the way, they (like almost everyone) gets this part wrong:
If the cost hits $2 billion, that’s three to four times what it would cost to send astronauts to do the job as they have four times before and as NASA planned before the Columbia disaster.
That’s not what it would cost to send the Shuttle. The marginal cost of a Shuttle flight is somewhere between a hundred and hundred fifty million dollars. They’re basing this assessment on the average cost, which is more than half a billion, but that’s not the number one would properly use to make that decision.
Robert Mugabe’s lunatic government “…wants to bring in obese tourists from overseas so that they can shed pounds doing manual labour on land seized from white farmers.”
I’ll be interested to see the brochure for that one.
You couldn’t make this stuff up–no one would believe you.