A brilliant son, that is, who ran off a cliff to his death because he feared an “unclean” dog.
One Darwin nominee, coming up.
Dilbert Does The Blogosphere
Not quite as much fun as Debbie Does Dallas, but it’s pretty amusing.
Thirty Eight Years Ago
Today is the first of three grim anniversaries in late January and early February (within a week of each other) of the deaths of American astronauts. On this day in 1967, Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom were incinerated on the launch pad in a ground test of the Apollo capsule.
Jim Oberg has more on these closely-timed anniversaries, in which he makes a compelling case that none of them were “accidents” but that all were avoidable, and that we’ve been lucky that we aren’t commemorating even more astronaut deaths. Here’s what I wrote a year ago (in which I criticized NASA’s reluctance to send a Shuttle to Hubble, a subject on which nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind).
[Update a little after noon]
OK, my dear friend Tim Kyger is whining at me in email that they didn’t die from their burns–they died from asphyxiation. True enough.
I didn’t explicitly say that the burns killed them, but I did imply it, and probably “incineration” is too strong a word for the degree of the burn damage to their bodies. The point remains that they died from a fire (and their deaths, like those of their later colleagues in the Shuttle) were avoidable.
Frightening Thought
How many clueless people are going to respond to this email and install the trojan attached?
Dear Sir/Madam,
We kindly ask you to install this update to your PC as soon as possible.
In the libraries of OS Windows
Rethinking The Chinese Space Program
Glenn has a piece at TCS about it today. He links also to the one I wrote for National Review back in the fall of ought three. In addition, he links to another one that Mark Whittington wrote at The Space Review in the summer of that year. There, Mark wrote:
One interesting point against the idea of a Chinese space threat was made recently by Rand Simberg in his Transterrestrial Musings weblog. He stated,
We Need An Independent Commission
…to investigate the “results” of the “Independent Commission” that investigated Rathergate. It looks like Thornburgh and Boccardi may have set themselves up for a libel suit.
This won’t go away until CBS and its defenders decide to let it all hang out, and display a little honesty. At a minimum, they have to stop making a laughing stock of themselves and admit that that the documents are fake beyond a reasonable doubt. That, plus a very public apology to Matley, might at least make this legal problem go away.
The Religious Left
Joe Katzman has an interesting post on how the “progressive” movement has devolved to ritual.
On The Take?
In light of the Armstrong Williams and Kos controversies, and now this story about Maggie Gallagher, it occurs to me that I should disclose formally that I’ve been doing some consulting for one of the CEV/Exploration contractors (Boeing) for the past few months. I don’t think that it’s influenced my blogging at all (other than reducing the volume, because I’ve been busy), though it’s possible that I’ve been a little more reticent to rant at some things than I might if I weren’t in the middle of them.
I’ve hinted at this in the past, but I just wanted to make it clear. I certainly haven’t posted anything here with the intent of explicitly aiding Boeing’s strategic efforts, and I in fact continue to believe that CEV in anything resembling its current form (entry body on an expendable rocket) is a huge mistake (not a position that Boeing would ever publicly take, I suspect). But I did want to avoid any major payola scandals that might get reported by Howie Kurtz.
The Revolution Continues
Well, at least Iowahawk says that they are still revolting:
We are still revolting because someone needs to be the voice of sanity in AmeriKKKa.
It’s time someone else on this campus besides the faculty learns the ugly truth: with every passing day under BushCo, this country creeps farther and farther beyond the ragged edge of mass political madness, into a sickening extremist mobius strip Texas twilight zone of fat, hydra-headed oilmen electrocuting the innocent while money-green puke gushes from their eye sockets across a basketball court covered in Eggo toaster waffles. Until the rest of you awake from your sheeple dream to the reality of this nightmare, we in the campus reality-based resistance will be like the courageous European boy Hans Brinker — putting our finger in the eroding dyke of Human Rights and shouting out to the world that the Chimperor has no clothes.
Actually, I think that one of his commenters is right. The ‘Hawk is slacking off–he probably just cut’n’pasted this from Democratic Underground. It is a gut buster nonetheless.
“Give A Little, Take A Lot”
Businessweek has a nice little history of Linux, and Linus Torvalds.