Too Gruesome?

The media outlets don’t want to show the beheading video.

“It’s a pretty clear call for us,” said Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “I think the viewer will understand what happened to Mr. Berg. They won’t have to sit through the graphic images.”

Yup, just as they don’t have to sit through the graphic images of people plunging from the towers. Apparently they only show (and reshow) graphic images when it’s of American “atrocities.”

Note that I’m not necessarily complaining that they’re not showing the video. But some of those same media outlets should be asking themselves to what degree showing all of the Abu Ghraib photos may have resulted in this, and why they considered that necessary. After all, couldn’t the viewers have understood what went on in the prison without the graphic images?

And since we’ve been told that even worse photos are coming in the days ahead, perhaps they’ll give the matter a little more consideration before airing them?

[Wednesday morning update]

Ratherbiased.com has similar questions for CBS and Dan Rather.

Al-Zarqawi Apologizes For Beheading

I was going to do a satire on the bizarro world in which this actually might occur, but the Ace of Spaces beat me to it. He has other, pertinent aerospace-related news, too.

..engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that they had successfully granted a 200-pound sow the power of flight. “We just grafted four pairs of condor wings on to the pig,” said Henry Fields, project manager of the Winged Wilbur project. “You should see that pig fly. It’s something to behold, I’ll tell you. And we’re going to need flying pig technology in the future, given the widespread effects of global environmental change. The latest reports of the temperatures plummeting in Hell should be a warning to us all.”

[Update at 5:40 PM PDT]

Scrappleface has apparently been visiting that planet as well.

We need to get the cost of access to space down so we can all move there.

A Warrior For Human Nature

Now here’s a poor guy who couldn’t catch a break.

First, he’s gelded in a circumcision accident, then he’s raised as a girl at the instigation of a psychologist who believes that gender is a social construct, then after rebelling against this forced gender swap at the age of fifteen, he has to undergo reconstructive surgery and remove the breasts that grew as a result of the hormone treatments, and last week, as a result of a financial fraud that impoverished him, he committed suicide.

As the article says, he made a valuable contribution to science, providing major evidence against the Blank Slate hypothesis, and showing the folks who think that gender is infinitely malleable to be terminally deluded. Thanks to him, perhaps no other little boys will have to go through what he went through.

RIP, David Reimer.

One Born Every Minute

Here’s the latest spam I got in email:

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Yes, we all know about Google’s “rules and regulations.” I wonder if they’re trying to play off all the buzz about the IPO?

And they only want a hundred bucks.

Land Of More Enchantment

New Mexico has been selected to host the X-Prize Cup.

[Update]

Here’s more info.

[Another update]

Here’s more from the New York Times. It’s very confusing–they seem to be conflating the Ansari X-Prize with the X-Prize Cup, which will be a separate annual competitive event, much like the Americas Cup of sailing.

[One more]

Leonard David has fleshed out the story more, with a better explanation of what the X-Prize Cup (which is what this story is about) is about.

Space Solar Power

Geoff Landis has a paper out on novel approaches to space solar power systems.

One of the reasons I’m skeptical of lunar He3 for fusion as a viable space based business is the competition from SPS. If you can put enough infrastructure on the moon to process the enormous quantities of regolith needed to extract He3, you can just as easily churn out huge numbers of SPS satellites. Unless there is some unforseen showstopper with SPS (and the only one I can think of is possible long term environmental effects due to the microwave beam, but that seems unlikely), then SPS construction will win over He3 fusion. We can do SPS with current technology. We’re not even close to being able to do fusion with He3, and we won’t be for probably two decades. That’s just fusing the He3, not doing it cheaply enough to compete with other power sources.

I’m slowly churning through a detailed piece on fusion which will hopefully clarify a lot of these issues, but I’m a having trouble making the piece not suck, so don’t hold your breath. Hopefully I’ll get unstuck soon.

Still Interested

President Bush is planning a speech in the next month or two addressing the new space policy (probably after the Aldridge Commission reports in early June).

Sources said Bush has been briefed on the hearings held by the commission and is awaiting its report to help frame his forthcoming remarks. Despite the approaching presidential election, the speech, which will reiterate Bush’s call for advanced human exploration of space, will not necessarily be made “in a political context.”

But you can bet it will be interpreted that way by people who don’t know any better.

Sources said although there has not been widespread support for the space plan since its debut, the president has felt no need to rush to make additional public comments. Bush has remained “highly enthusiastic” about his space proposal and his lack of additional mentions of the idea should not be taken as a cooling of interest, they said.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!