Researchers have developed a technique for building living tissue with ink-jet printers.

[via Geek Press]

The LA Times says there’s a new study out that contradicts Lott.

Not to poison the well, but it’s from the Brookings Institution, by a law professor, for what that’s worth. But there’s really no way to evaluate it until we see the data in detail.

In thinking about the past weekend’s marches, and their sponsors, and the unwillingness of so many to distance themselves from them, I was reminded a post that I put up a couple months after the towers fell, about what I did in a similar situation, when much younger than most of last weekend’s marchers.

Since the first flowering of the space age, there are two traditional dates for American presidents to make announcements of grand new space initiatives.

The first is the annual State of the Union address, in which the President not only describes events of the past year, but new initiatives and goals for the next.

This was the context in which, in January 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced that the United States would build a space station within a decade.

Unfortunately, it’s been almost two decades, and the station is not yet complete, although we brought in international partners to “help.”

The second is the anniversary of the first landing of men on the Moon and (not entirely coincidentally), the anniversary of the landing of the first Viking probe on Mars, July 20th.

In 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush chose the latter date to give a speech on the Mall, in which, in an attempt to address his perceived lack of the “vision thing,” he announced a “Space Exploration Initiative.” If any remember that ill-fated announcement, it was as a call to the nation to send Americans to Mars, because the culmination of it was a manned Mars landing in 2019, three decades after the initial announcement. But it was actually much more than that. In the words of the president, we would:

“…return to the Moon, this time to stay, and then on to Mars, and settle the solar system.”

But few remember any of it now, because it was strangled in the cradle by a cynical space agency that had no desire to do anything beyond earth orbit. The NASA administrator at the time, Richard Truly, actually had his congressional liaison lobby against it on Capitol Hill (one of the reasons that he was later fired and replaced by Dan Goldin).

When the agency put forth its report of what would be involved, it gathered up all of the technology sandboxes and hobbyshops around the NASA centers, and used it as an excuse to justify everything that the agency had done, was doing, and wanted to do. The bill came out to half a trillion dollars. It died aborning.

But these anniversaries have been used for other announcements as well. In 1986, the hope was that the State of the Union address by President Reagan would be a triumphant announcement of the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe (NASA just recently reinitiated this program).

Sadly, instead, the speech, delayed by tragedy, was partly a eulogy. In the first paragraph, the President said:

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, distinguished members of the Congress, honored guests and fellow citizens, thank you for allowing me to delay my address until this evening. We paused together to mourn and honor the valor of our seven Challenger heroes . And I hope that we are now ready to do what they would want us to do–go forward America and reach for the stars. We will never forget those brave seven, but we shall go forward.

Barely a week earlier, the space shuttle Challenger had been destroyed on ascent, with the loss of all crew aboard, including Ms. McAuliffe, while millions of schoolchildren (most of whom are now adults) watched, live on television.

Of all the possible shuttle launches to incur such a catastrophe, there couldn’t have been a worse one. Launches had become routine in the almost half a decade since the first flight in 1981, and few normally watched them. But the eyes of the nation, including all of the schools, were on this one because of the first teacher astronaut.

Also, this was a flight that “looked like America.” In addition to Christa and the pilots, it had Judy Resnik, a female Jewish astronaut from Ohio, Ellison Onizuka, a Japanese-American, Ron McNair, an African-American, and Greg Jarvis, a non-NASA employee, who was doing research for his company, Hughes Space and Communications.

The trauma for the nation was the greatest since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, almost a quarter of a century earlier, because it had grown to believe that NASA could do no wrong, and the sudden sense of its fallibility came as a shock.

I find it particularly memorable because it occurred on the anniversary of the date of my birth. As someone who was working on the program at the time, I’ve written my own memories of that date at my weblog. Others’ memories of that sad day can be found here and here.

Next Tuesday, January 28, will be the seventeenth anniversary of that event. It happens to coincide with the next State of the Union address by President George W. Bush.

I hope that he will note the sad anniversary. I also expect him to have somber news regarding foreign affairs, and I expect that he will announce that we will soon be once again actively at war, perhaps within the next couple of weeks.

But rumors abound that he will announce something else, to give us hope for a brighter future, and a vision for not just this nation and world, but for a universe into which we can expand, and bring forth unending freedom and opportunity and life, in the midst of our monumental struggle against those who would deprive us of all, had they their way.

It is expected that he will announce, if not in this address, then in the announcement of the 2004 budget, an initiative to develop new, badly needed power sources for space activities. They will be nuclear power sources, an avenue of research that has been cut off for years for both fiscal and political reasons.

In-space nuclear power will bring the ability to survive the chilly sun-starved two-week nights of the Moon. It will power the rockets that can deliver us to Mars in a few weeks, rather than a few months. It will provide the basis for an ability to control asteroids, not just to prevent them from ending our species as they did the dinosaurs, but to harvest their bounty.

The project has been appropriately called Prometheus, after the Titan of Greek mythology who granted humans the gift of fire, and power, something previously the privilege of the gods alone. For his beneficence, he was condemned by the gods to an eternity of misery, chained to a rock to have his liver eaten by an eagle and regrown to be devoured again and again.

Lord Byron described it best:

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity’s recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense…

If NASA can deliver such an equivalent boon to us now, it will deserve not punishment, but praise, for as long as humankind exists in the universe.

This won’t be a roadblock.

It won’t even be a speedbump.

Did I mention this before?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you…

[long drum roll]

[KERBAM!]

Turkish Star Trek…

How did we live so long without it?

A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Bill Whittle (who I really should add to the blogroll), in a long essay, slices and dices today’s spoiled empty-headed celebrities.

[Update]

Doh!

Great minds think alike, I guess.

I just noticed that Asparagirl used exactly the same title to post this, and beat me by a couple days. I won’t change mine, because I’m too unimaginative right now to come up with a better one, but I’ll just leave this note as a nod to her first use.

Over at Welch’s site, an email buddy of his asks:

The entire pundacracy [sic], including in the blogisphere [sic], is seriously out of touch with mainstream opinion. Every pundit I have read so far is either for an attack on Iraq regardless of the U.N., or against an attack on Iraq, regardless of the U.N. Has any opinion-giver out there come out in favor of an attack only if the U.N. approves? Like, apparently, half the American population?

Well, half the US population is unacquainted with the fact that the earth orbits the sun, and would be unlikely to be able to point out the location of the UN headquarters on a map of Manhattan, let alone a globe (or at least that’s my recollection of the rough number the last time I saw a poll on the subject), so I’m not sure that’s a very good criterion to use to determine whether or not bloggers and pundits should agree with a position.

I think that most realistic and thoughtful people, along the political spectrum, have come to realize that the UN in its present form is an anachronism–a relic of the post war and the Cold War, now over for more than a decade. Further, to the degree that it is relevant at all, the UN at this point is primarily useful as a tool for other policy ends, and given the stakes of taking out Saddam by force, or not, whether or not the UN approves is indeed a marginal issue.

Last fall’s activities by Powell and Bush, forcing the UN to finally become serious about its own resolutions with respect to Iraq, were not just a last chance for Saddam, but a last chance for the UN as well. If we end up having to go into Iraq without the UN’s approval (though by the plain text of SCR 1141 we truly already have it), or are perceived to have done so, and are successful, it will probably be the end of that institution.

In a follow up to my post about the numbers not adding up for the efficacy of Total Situational Awareness, Jay Manifold has a mathematical proof that anyone who opposes TSA should also oppose gun control.

On “Fox News Sunday” this past Sunday, Juan Williams played devil’s advocate for the “peace” protestors, and managed to come off sounding almost as dumb as they do. He said that the Administration still hasn’t shown any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda (making the implicit, and mistaken, assumption that this is necessary in order to justify regime change in Iraq as part of the “War on Terrorism”). Therefore, he concluded, it must be about…wait for it…ooooiiiiillllll.

Now, to be generous, let me just say that there are several steps missing in the logical sequence that would result in such a conclusion, but he was right about one thing.

The Administration in fact hasn’t made a good coherent case for why we’re taking out Saddam, in the context of the “War on Terrorism.” This is because we aren’t really engaged in a war on terrorism, which is only a tactic, any more than we’re engaged in a War on Boxcutters, or a War on Bellybombs, or a War on Shoebombs. We are, of course, waging a war on Islamic fundamentalism, and particularly that variety of it that continues to emanate from Saudi-controlled Arabia which, for short, we can designate Islamism.

I think that the Administration recognizes the reality, but fear that they can’t state it clearly, both because it would tip off our enemies as to the ultimate war aim, and because they may fear that they won’t get support from the public if it’s stated sufficiently baldly. That aim is to completely remake the Middle East, as I noted in my previous post, below.

I think that they’re wrong, and that the public will accept the premise that we are engaged in a struggle of ideology just as important, and just dangerous, in its own way, as the ones we faced against Nazism and Stalinism in the last century, and won. He has an opportunity in next week’s State of the Union address to start to expand on previous statements, and to make that case.

It will, unfortunately, require a little backtracking, because he has been so adamant since the WTC atrocity to say that our war is not against Islam. The reality is that it is, at least against a particular sect of it, and at some point we will not be able to fight it effectively if we don’t open declare it.

I would like to believe that the appeasement of the Saudis up to this point has been not just the product of entrenched Arabists in Foggy Bottom, and long-time Bush family connections with the House of Saud, but also a delaying tactic until we were ready to confront them head on. Once Iraqi oil is flowing freely, its proceeds going to build a democracy in Irag, rather than funding palaces, dungeons and WMD, the Saudis will no longer be able to threaten us as the swing oil producer. At that point, I hope that they will receive the appropriate ultimatum, which is to shut down the madrassas and democratize, or join Saddam.

There is a liberal democratic case to be made for this war, just as there was for the second world war, and the Cold War. It’s time for the Administration to start making it, forcefully, coherently and persuasively.

Which is just a long way of saying that Tom Friedman has made a start at helping them do so.