Who should be our next president, Cthulhu, or the Sweet Meteor of Death?
I think they should run as a unity ticket, myself. Assuming Cthulhu has a heart, he could be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Video Issues
OK, Linux people. Blender will let me make to edit and export a video as an AVI JPEG, but it refuses to export the synched audio to it. However, it will export the audio by itself as a .flac.
Does anyone know any separate tools that would allow me to synch that audio file with the video?
[Update a while later]
OK, VLC sort of works. Problem is that for some reason it really messes up the title when I add audio. If I were to post the MP4 and .flac files, could someone else try to synch them?
[Update late afternoon]
OK, I tried this:ffmpeg -i RoadToMars.wav -i 0001-9000.avi RoadToMarsAudio.avi
Continue reading Video Issues
Old Cells
Faster, please.
Man Makes Sculpture Of A Man Talking To A Woman
Of course they are. By the way, I can’t commend Ashe Schow enough on how she’s coming to the defense of men.
Space Settlement
Rick Tumlinson says the concept is taking hold within the space community.
Meanwhile, the Center For American Progress is having a symposium on the past and future of human spaceflight. Interestingly, as Jeff Foust notes on Twitter, NASA isn’t involved. Interesting also that it’s sponsored by a lefty institution. I suspect that this topic may set off a civil war on that side of the spectrum.
Another Private Mars Venture
These people want to set up at the pole. “Looking for alien life” doesn’t seem compatible with settlement, though, unless you don’t care if you contaminate or wipe it out.
Rand Paul
Roger Simon isn’t impressed:
Alas Rand (I had higher hopes for him), like father Ron, has a mega-chauvanistic view of the world. The USA is so big and strong it causes everything, including, at one point, 9-11, and now ISIS, if you can believe that. Never mind that the Islamic State is just another avatar of Islamic imperialism’s desire for a world caliphate that has been going on for centuries, long before our country was in existence — the Battle of Tours (732), the Siege of Vienna (1683) and on and on. The violence has been there forever, too. As any literate person knows, it’s in the Koran and the Hadith. Beheadings were part of Mohammed’s game plan. It’s what he did and what he called for. This was not invented by a cabal of neocons in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2003.
And of course ISIS is part of a straight line that goes from the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in 1928, long before the current crop of Republicans were even alive) to Al Qaeda via Zawahiri and on into the modern age with ISIS, all working from the same ideological playbook, as are Boko Haram, Hamas, al Shabab, al Nusra, etc., etc.
Rand, again like father Ron, is essentially racist in blaming this on America and not recognizing other cultures have belief systems to which they truly adhere and that those belief systems may be dangerous, even evil. America did not evolve Islamist ideology anymore than it did Nazism, but the Islamists have the potential to wreak just as much havoc if they are not stopped. I don’t blame Dr. Jasser for being upset. I’d be furious. People like him, at immense personal risk, have been working for the necessary reform of Islam every waking moment of their lives.
Yes. It is profoundly racist to deny the Arabs (and other people) moral agency, but that’s, of course, always the attitude of the Left. It is sad to see Senator Paul fall for the same thing. On foreign policy, he seems to be running for the wrong party’s nomination.
[Update a few minutes later]
More links from Elizabeth Price Foley.
ObamaCare’s Intent
Megan McArdle has what may seem like a crazy idea to some: Just read the law.
Russia’s Space Problems
They think they understand the cause of the Proton failure, but not that of the Progress.
Cholesterol
Matt Wridley has a brief history of how it’s not bad for you. And this is worth repeating in the context of climate “science”:
If challenged to show evidence for low-cholesterol advice, the medical and scientific profession has tended to argue from authority — by pointing to WHO guidelines or other such official compendia, and say “check the references in there”. But those references lead back to Keys and Framingham and other such dodgy dossiers. Thus does bad science get laundered into dogma. “One of the great commandments of science is ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’,” said Carl Sagan.
Similarly, mistrust people who talk about “consensus” and quote fake statistics on how many scientists believe something.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link is fixed now.