The top eight places to look for it. Not including earth, of course.
I think that Carolyn Porco thinks that Enceladus is a better candidate than Europa, but it’s a lot harder to get to.
Journalism
Ann Althouse read some crap at the WaPo so we didn’t have to.
Buzzfeed
Jon Gabriel gives it a taste of it’s own social-justice medicine. Pretty funny.
Isn’t the notion that homosexual behavior is a sin a pretty mainstream Christian belief?
[Update a while later]
As @CamEdwards noted, the notorious Chip & Joanna Gaines of HGTV sent a swag bag to welcome a gay fan to town. https://t.co/pvlwlAb5C8 pic.twitter.com/pWNmBnw7Mv
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) December 1, 2016
[Late-afternoon update]
Shorter: "There was no story and we set the mob on these people for no reason because we're a garbage website." https://t.co/Eslm5vMDMI
— RBe (@RBPundit) December 1, 2016
It sure looks like BuzzFeed's @KateAurthur chose to attack the Gaines because she was mad that most people in Waco, Texas, voted for Trump. pic.twitter.com/1Or2UnGrjk
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 1, 2016
[Friday-morning update]
Buzzfeed has provided helpful instructions as to what to do with their “Fixer Upper” article.
Trump Space Policy
Lee Billings has a good piece on the current state of play.
Fortunately, given the vision being displayed by wealthy entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, we are approaching a day in which NASA and its budget will be largely irrelevant to humanity’s move into space.
Millennials’ Political Views
Young people support big government, unless it costs any more money. They’re for smaller government, unless budget cuts scratch a program they’ve heard of. They’d like Washington to fix everything, just so long as it doesn’t run anything.
Hardly surprising, considering that they were “educated” in a government-school system, and then went to colleges infested with mindless leftist professors. And I hate that the pollsters say they’re more “liberal” than older people. No, they’re more leftist.
An Android Hack
Apparently, my Droid 4 is vulnerable to this, but it’s unlikely it’s actually hit me since a) I don’t do much with my phone and b) I don’t rely on Google for my data storage, other than contacts. But I don’t understand why they can’t patch. I don’t think I should have to upgrade my phone/OS in order to protect myself from this sort of thing.
Nuclear Batteries
OK, so how soon could this be available for a planetary mission? What’s the power/mass ratio, and cost, compared to an RTG?
Che
I know what I’m going to get my college-age niece for Christmas.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Fidel Castro dies, Justin Troudeau hardest hit:
And so, from far-off Antananarivo, Madagascar, where he was attending the 80-government gathering of La Francophonie, Trudeau’s lament for the last of the Cold War dictators ended up confirming every wicked caricature of his own vacuity and every lampoon of the Trudeau government’s foreign-policy lack of seriousness.
Twitter lit up with hilarious mockeries under the hashtag #trudeaueulogies. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio wanted to know whether Trudeau’s statement came from a parody account. The impeccably liberal Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, called Trudeau’s praise of Castro “a sad statement for the leader of a democracy to make.”
Whether or not Trudeau saw any of this coming, he didn’t appear to notice that he was delivering a speech to La Francophonie delegates in Madagascar that emphasized justice for lesbian, gay and transgender people, while from the other side of his mouth he was praising the legacy of a caudillo who spent the first decade of his rule rounding up gay people for “re-education” in labour camps. Homosexuals were irredeemably bourgeois maricones and agents of imperialism, Castro once explained.
To be perfectly fair, Trudeau did allow that Castro was a “controversial figure,” and nothing in his remarks was as explicit as the minor classic in the genre of dictator-worship that his brother Alexandre composed for the Toronto Star 10 years ago. Alexandre described Castro as “something of a superman. . . an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything.” As for the Cuban people: “They do occasionally complain, often as an adolescent might complain about a too strict and demanding father.”
This kind of Disco Generation stupidity about Castro has been commonplace in establishment circles in Canada since Pierre’s time, and neither Alexandre’s gringo-splaining nor Justin’s aptitude for eulogy are sufficient to gloss over the many things Cubans have every right to complain about.
….For all the parochial Canadian susceptibility to the propaganda myth that pits a shabby-bearded rebel in olive fatigues against the imperialist American hegemon, by the time he died on Friday night Castro was one of the richest men in Latin America. Ten years ago, when he was handing the presidency to Raúl, Forbes magazine calculated that Fidel’s personal wealth was already nearly a billion dollars.
In his twilight years, Castro was enjoying himself at his gaudy 30-hectare Punto Cero estate in Havana’s suburban Jaimanitas district, or occasionally retreating to his private yacht, or to his beachside house in Cayo Piedra, or to his house at La Caleta del Rosario with its private marina, or to his duck-hunting chalet at La Deseada.
Fidel Castro was not merely the “controversial figure” of Justin Trudeau’s encomium. He was first and foremost a traitor to the Cuban revolution. On that count alone, Castro’s death should not be mourned. It should be celebrated, loudly and happily.
Indeed. I’ve found the Trudeau worship even more ridiculous than the adulation of the God Obama. I’d be profoundly embarrassed to be a Canadian.
Orbital ATK
This is interesting. The company is getting into the orbital assembly business:
Phase one of CIRAS began in September 2016 and will last a total of two years. During this period, Orbital ATK will lead the team in maturing technologies necessary for robotic assembly of large space structures, such as next-generation telescopes or solar-powered structures for transport or communications. These capabilities include methods to connect or disconnect joints on a structure and address precision measuring and alignment through a 15-meter robotic arm and a precision robot. The team will also develop the technology needed to conduct in-orbit modular assembly of structures, allowing parts to be brought to space as needed via multiple launches, which simplifies the design of spacecraft and reduces cost. [Emphasis mine]
They must realize that this increases the risk to SLS, and their SRB production. Have they decided that this new business focus is a better bet?
Fidel Castro
Hardest hit: Colin Kaepernick.
OK, actually, in the wake of that, NFL is hardest hit.
More substantial thoughts tomorrow.
[Update a few minutes later]
Nope, still not tired of winning. https://t.co/0CVpEIxpfa
— John Durant (@johndurant) November 26, 2016
If we can lose a few more tyrants, that wouldn’t be a bad way to end the year.
[Sunday update]
Castro, Chavez, and “bad luck.”
[Monday-morning update]
A dictator dies a failure:
Lee Kwan Yew, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Chiang Kai Shek, Park Chung-he: all of these dictators and authoritarians can mock Fidel Castro. They left their countries better off than they found them, and while many of them committed terrible crimes, they can also point to great accomplishments. Fidel has only the crimes.
Fidel never wanted “normalization” of economic relations with the United States. Normalization would mean the end of his dream. Without barriers, Cuban-Americans in Miami would buy back much of the island from its current owners, re-installing themselves as leaders in the society from which he hoped to banish them forever. Amrerican trade and American tourism would once more become the most important factors in Cuba’s economy, and American cultural and poltiical influence would flow unrestricted across the island on a tide of American media.
The openings Castro allowed, very limited in the Clinton years, wider in the Obama years, were forced on him by economic necessity. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s forced Castro to allow more remittances from Miami and to open up the island to more tourism to stave off a crisis at home. The collapse of Venezuela in the Obama years has once more driven Cuba to the wall. In the end, Fidel became what he hated most: a failed Latin caudillo, presiding over a corrupt and despairing society, propped up by the Catholic Church and the United States.
Nobody knew this better than Fidel Castro, and he must sometimes have cursed the fate that let him outlive not only the global socialist movement led by the Soviet Union but the regional socialist resurgence led by Venezuela. The failure of the Venezuelan revolution stripped the last shreds of credibility away from Fidel’s socialist dream. Not even a country awash in oil, facing no U.S. trade embargo, can make socialism work in Latin America. And it was the failure of Venezuela, and the loss of the economic subsidies that Chavez lavished on his mentor and inspirer Fidel Castro, that plunged Cuba back into its post-Soviet poverty and forced Fidel to remain silent as his brother Raul accepted the return of American tourists and an American ambassador to Havana.
Fidel leaves a shattered society and a desperately poor country behind him. Cuba is more divided today than it was when he conquered it; it is less able to shape its destiny than it was in 1959, and its future will likely be more closely linked to the United States after his death than before his seizure of power.
The good thing is, he died.
[Update a few minutes later]
As Heinlein once noted, a good cook can make a tasty meal from good ingredients, while an incompetent one can create an inedible mess from the same materials. Cuba had, and still has, great ingredients. As Will notes, Castro broke the eggs, but the meal never appeared.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Castro bet on the wrong horse, and died a failure.
Well, if you consider dying filthy rich by stealing from the people you oppressed and murdered a failure, I guess.
[Bumped]