In honor of the occasion, I’ve decided to make all of today’s posts green.
Now I’m going out to the store to pick up a corned beef–a dish that I only have once a year (partly because Patricia doesn’t like it, but I’m back in California, and she’s in Florida, so I can indulge the holiday and my tastes). I may make some soda bread as well.
Jeffrey Bell has a thought-provoking article over at Space Daily today on the potential costs of the president’s space initiative, and the viability of doing the lunar base. However, my thoughts haven’t been adequately provoked yet to respond, or even decide to what degree I agree or disagree with it.
A deranged young man attempted to crucify himself. Horizontally.
He may be a danger to himself, but clearly not to society.
Just how ignorant are network news anchors?
Don’t ask, but consider that while cruising the channels, the guy on CNN Newsnight said that the new object discovered, several billion miles away, was the “most distant object found in the universe.”
Just how ignorant are network news anchors?
Don’t ask, but consider that while cruising the channels, the guy on CNN Newsnight said that the new object discovered, several billion miles away, was the “most distant object found in the universe.”
Just how ignorant are network news anchors?
Don’t ask, but consider that while cruising the channels, the guy on CNN Newsnight said that the new object discovered, several billion miles away, was the “most distant object found in the universe.”
I think that John Kerry’s…revelation…that he’s the preferred candidate of some unnamed foreign leaders is a mistake on several levels. It will obviously sell well among his base that the oh-so-sophisticated-and-nuanced-himself Jacque Chirac thinks that Kerry is his man (and who else does Mr. Kerry intend for us to infer as his hopeful future counterpart?). But it’s not at all clear that this will sell that well with independents and undecideds. What will the campaign slogan be–“Vote Kerry–The French Choice”? I suspect that in fact most American want their president to be vetted and supported by Americans, not “furriners.”
But an even bigger mistake is making the claim, and then feigning outrage when someone questions him on it, or wants more details. It opens up an opportunity for his opponents (so far not capitalized on, at least by the White House).
Their current response is to claim that if he won’t name names, then he must be making it up. Maybe this will be an effective tactic, but it sounds dumb to me. There’s no doubt in my mind that there are foreign leaders, even former US “allies” who would prefer Kerry (or any Democrat, or even any non-simian cowboy) in the White House to George Bush, so the charges that he’s a liar or making it up don’t have much weight to me.
I think that a much more effective commercial would be something like:
John Kerry says that some unnamed foreign leaders would prefer him as president to our current president. If this is true, why will he not name them?
Is it because among those names might be Kim Jung Il, the brutal North Korean dictator whose state-controlled press has been extolling Mr. Kerry’s virtues? Or Bashir Assad of terrorist-supporting Syria? Or Yasser Arafat, who continues to sponsor terrorism in Israel? The mullahs in Iran?
Or Osama bin Laden?
What is Mr. Kerry trying to hide?
We believe that an American president should be the choice of Americans, not unnamed foreign leaders.
It would serve him right for such an odious and dumb campaign tactic, and considering that I just saw a poll indicating that sixty percent of registered voters think that terrorists would prefer Kerry to Bush, I suspect that it would be a very effective ad.
And you know what else? I’ll be that, despite his supposed chumminess with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair isn’t on that list.
Maybe, but there’s no way to tell from this article.
I keep seeing these reports of how NASA and DARPA are coming up with techniques to “shape” shock waves and sonic boom, and how this is going to lead to a brave new world of overland supersonic flight. But I never see any quantification of the benefit of such techniques. The other thing that I never see is a discussion of the effect on wave drag, which is the other big factor that prevents economical supersonic flight.
As I’ve written before, there actually may be design solutions that can significantly reduce, and even approach elimination of both sonic boom and wave drag, but NASA and DARPA continue to refuse to consider them. Perhaps when this latest attempt doesn’t pan out, they’ll be willing to finally do so.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a Usenet discussion on the topic from a few years ago among yours truly, and several others.
That is, they did if their goal in Friday’s bombing was to remove the Spanish government that supported the War on Terror. And why wouldn’t it be their goal?
I very much fear that the Spanish electorate has just dramatically increased the probability of a terrorist attack on American soil in late October and early November, emboldening them to think that they can influence American politics as well. And I hope that if my fear comes true, that in our case, it will have exactly the opposite of the intended effect, as September 11 did.
At first glance, this didn’t seem like a very auspicious beginning for government-sponsored prizes in the modern era.
A $1 million race across a southern California desert by driverless robots ended Saturday after all 15 entries either broke down or withdrew, a race official said.
Two of the entries covered about seven miles (11 kilometers) of the roughly 150-mile (240-kilometer) course in the Mojave Desert while eight failed to make it to the one-mile (1500 meter) mark. Others crashed seconds after starting.
Color me confused. No, flabbergasted.
Were there some rules of which I’m not aware of in this contest? Like you couldn’t run the course, or some facsimile of it, ahead of time? You weren’t allowed to test your vehicle under actual course conditions?
I should start by saying that I’m not sure what the purpose of making it a real-time race was, unless they thought that this would generate more public excitement, or perhaps make it more challenging by having to deal with competitors as well as the course itself. If the goal is to get from Barstow to Vegas in a certain amount of time, then that’s the goal–why have everyone do it at the same time?
Why not do it like the X-Prize people, at least to start? Set a date that you’re going to make the attempt, have the judges show up to watch, and do the attempt. No need to have everyone go at once. Use graduated prizes–a million for the first, half a million for the second, a quarter million each for the next four. Once you’ve got some vehicles that can demonstrate their ability to do it, then you put them on the same course and actually have them race each other in real time.
But what amazes me is that, given that it was a real-time race (you had to beat not just the clock, but other competitors), wouldn’t you want to test and see if you could do it at all first, let alone in the allotted time period?
I mean, if I had a Formula I car, I don’t think I’d enter it in a race with other Formula I cars, or even with the pace car or a bicycle, until I’d at least seen if it could make it around the track once or twice. In fact, you know, I think that I’d drive the course the requisite number of times to win, and even see if I could at least approach some course records before I actually put it in competition.
Yet somehow, not a single one of these team’s vehicles were capable of making it five percent of the distance without some kind of breakdown. What’s up with that? Could it really be just an unfortunate set of circumstances, lousy luck all around?
Does anyone have an explanation?