RIP.
In addition to the books and short stories, he wrote some Twilight Zone episodes, and Star Trek.
I woke up from s nap and my wife told me we'd lost Harlan. I knew his writing forever, and knew him for over 30 years. I don't know that we were friends; he liked my stuff, but he always scared hell out of me. I know I'll miss him. The field, too. Our enfant terrible is gone. https://t.co/kDT1Abqb0N
— Harry Turtledove (@HNTurtledove) June 28, 2018
A reminder from David Bernstein that evangelicals supported the immoral candidate because the Left had put the fear of un-God into them. Many of those SCOTUS victories for were Pyrrhic for them.
He’s doing his annual fundraiser. He does good stuff.
I might do this myself, but I don’t feel like I’ve been doing quality blogging recently. Too busy with other stuff, some of which is remunerative.
We expected this yesterday, but here it is:
Following an Independent Review Board report on the James Webb Space Telescope project, NASA has announced a further delay to the telescope’s anticipated launch. Coming just three months after a year-long delay to 2020, NASA now says the telescope will not be ready to launch until 2021 at the earliest and that the project will breach its $8.8 billion USD cost cap.
The cited mismanagement at NG and NASA is just staggering. The new overrun is about the amount that it was supposed to cost, in total, originally. What a programmatic disaster.
I hereby rename JWST the Jeebus Wept Sunkcost Trap
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) June 27, 2018
[Update after noon]
Here’s the story from Jeff Foust.
[Update a while later]
This can never be allowed to happen again…. The good news is that it does not have to. On Orbit Assembly transcends the limitations around building a big telescope on the ground, shaking the hell out of it for 10 minutes, then deploying it autonomously without fail. https://t.co/lPmq4UgdVi
— Dennis Wingo (@wingod) June 27, 2018
[Thursday-morning update]
Here‘s Marina Koren’s take:
A wiring error caused workers to apply too much voltage to the spacecraft’s pressure transducers, severely damaging them. And during an acoustics test, which examines whether hardware can survive the loud sounds of launch, the fasteners designed to hold the sun shield together came loose. The incident scattered 70 bolts, and engineers scrambled to find them. They’re still looking for a few. “We’re really close to finding every one of the pieces,” Zerbuchen said.
These three errors alone resulted in a schedule delay of about 1.5 years and $600 million, Young said.
I think that’s about Northrop Grumman’s annual net income. If I were NASA, I’d tell them that if they ever want another NASA contract, they’ll eat it themselves.
[Update a while later]
Alex Witze has more, over at Nature.
For people interested in non-terrestrial life, this should be a higher priority than Europa. It’s farther away, but a much more benign radiation environment.
Thoughts from David Harsanyi:
It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.
Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.
I've never seen a week in which the Holocaust, Nazis, Dred Scott and Korematsu were so trivialized.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 26, 2018
Emilee Speck got the court documents. As someone who’s known them all for years, this is very sad.
[Afternoon update]
Here’s a statement from Christina:
Personal Statement by Christina Korp @Buzzs_xtina regarding article about @TheRealBuzz lawsuit in the @WSJ pic.twitter.com/okyW8aztvY
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) June 25, 2018
[Wednesday-morning update]
Here’s the latest, from Chris Davenport.
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
Marina Koren has more at The Atlantic.
I just spent over two hours in a dentist’s chair, to prep a broken bicuspid for a crown. She’s meticulous, but tediously slow.
Well, now we know why the DoJ and FBI have been dragging their feet for so many months on those subpoenaed documents. I’m guessing we’ll soon be seeing a lot more, and worse.
And then there’s this:
One of the reasons they couldn't charge her for all the felonies she committed was that they couldn't do so without implicating Obama. https://t.co/iuPCxJuDIO
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 25, 2018
[Update a while later]
Not as much as he wanted to, but he did a lot of damage.
[Afternoon update]
Just got around to reading the whole thing at the first link:
On October 30, the Department of Justice finally got in gear to get a warrant — to include everything dealing during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure with the State Department and all devices — and especially the Comey-denominated “golden emails” from the BlackBerrys and all the messages sent to Abedin to be given to Mrs. Clinton, right?
Nope.
Shocker #1: Despite everyone’s recognition of the importance of the “explosive” “bomb,” and the “golden emails” on the Weiner laptop, the FBI never even sought to review the “golden” emails. FBI General Counsel Baker pushed hard to expand the application to include those, but Strzok and DOJ prosecutors shot it down.
Shocker #2: They deliberately ignored the emails between Huma Abedin and others — despite knowing she was a proxy for the Secretary and had lied to them in her interview.
Federal investigators knew people would email Abedin, and she would print things out for Clinton. Abedin admitted it was easier for her to print things from home in Brooklyn.
Logically then, it appears it was Abedin who deliberately stripped classified markings from emails to forward the information to Mrs. Clinton so she could then deny ever receiving anything marked classified. It’s called “plausible deniability,” and it was a deliberate and illegal scheme for handling classified information.
Shocker #3: Over analysts’ objections, the FBI never reviewed the Weiner laptop to determine if it had been compromised by foreign agents despite finding that Huma Abedin had forwarded classified information to it. Those were flagrant violations of 18 U.S.C. §793.
There are important conclusions from these facts in the inspector general’s report.
This is a much bigger cover up than Watergate, by orders of magnitude.
An interesting paper at Judith Curry’s site (which is a go-to place for people following the climate follies).
Once again, for the record, I find literally incredible the notion that we have either the understanding of the physical interactions or the computer power to predict future climate with any useful confidence.