Month: February 2008

Space smells like sweet welding fumes

From BoingBoing[*1] :

The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

We see what we expect to see

No surprise here[*1] :

Scientists at University College London[*2] have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study reveals that the context surrounding what we see is all important — sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren’t really there.

The paper reveals that a vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to ‘see’ imaginary shapes in the shadows when the light is poor.

There’s so very, very many ways you can go with this . . . from “Bush Lied” to seeing actual freedom-lovers in Hillary or Barack . . . to thinking that your team will win it all next year . . .

It blowed up good

Looks like we can “shoot down” near-Earth-orbit satellites[*1] with the best of ’em:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The missile that struck a rogue US spy satellite in space carrying toxic fuel reduced it to football-sized chunks, and the Pentagon said it had a “high degree of confidence” its fuel tank was destroyed, officials said Thursday.

General James Cartwright told reporters it would be 24-48 hours before a full confirmation would be available on the fuel tank.

The Defense Department has a “high degree of confidence we hit the tank” but “we can’t say for sure,” at this time, he said.

Sadr decides he doesn’t want to die quite yet

Our good and dear friend Mookie al-Sadr, “firebrand cleric” and self-appointed Shiite leader, says “um, well, OK, another six months of cease-fire with the Iraqi government and the American oppressors is a good idea” according to this story in the Long War Journal[*1] :

Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Sadrist movement and the commander of the Mahdi Army, has ordered the extension of the cease-fire, anonymous senior officials in his movement have told Reuters[*2] . The cease-fire, which was put in place after a major clash in Najaf in August 2007, will be extended by six months.

“Sadr had issued a declaration to preachers to be read during midday prayers on Friday at mosques affiliated with the cleric,” Reuters reported. “The general idea is that there will be an extension,” an unnamed senior official in Sadr’s movement in Baghdad told the news agency. “Sayed (Sadr) has distributed sealed envelopes to the imams of the mosques to be read tomorrow. They cannot be opened before tomorrow.” Another senior official in Najaf said the cease-fire would be extended by six months.

. . .

While the reporting has focused on the negative implications the US and the Iraqi government if Sadr ended the cease-fire, Sadr himself had his own problems if the truce was ended. After Sadr’s political movement withdrew from the government in early 2007, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki had a greater freedom of movement to tackle Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Since then, the Iraqi military has repositioned itself to take on the Mahdi Army in the south.

The US and Iraqi security forces have demonstrated a willingness to strike at Sadr’s Mahdi Army, even in his purported stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad. General David Petraeus pressured Maliki at the onset of the surge to take on the extreme elements of Mahdi Army as well as al Qaeda in Iraq, and Maliki approved. If Sadr ends the truce now, the US military is still at its peek in the number of combat brigades available for use in tackling the Mahdi Army.

By calling off the cease-fire, Sadr risked reigniting the violence in Iraq, which has dropped dramatically since last summer. Sadr risked alienating Iraqis as well as exposing his real level of support in the Shia community. The Iraqi government had the option of declaring the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement as illegal groups, and barring Sadrist politicians from running for political office.

Could it be that common sense is making an appearance in a Middle Eastern country?  Stay tuned . . .

Two items for a sister

She knows who she is.

Item 1:  Hayden Christensen (the young Darth Vader of the Star Wars movies) likes pigs[*1] :

Star Wars star Hayden Christensen has become the latest celebrity to take on a pair of porky pets – he now owns two Vietnamese potbellied pigs. The Canadian actor keeps the black pigs, named Buddy and Petunia, at his country farm retreat outside Toronto, and admits they’ve forced him to rethink his diet.

Item 2:  45 cats are too many[*2] :

The original charges followed the seizure of 45 cats from Young’s home last March. Two dozen cats had to be euthanized.

Treat them kitties well.  Or else.

Both via Fark[*3] .

Two billion Earth-like worlds?

Next Big Future[*1] connects the dots–those dots being studies from Caltech[*2] :

Astronomers have discovered that terrestrial planets might form around many, if not most, of the nearby sun-like stars in our galaxy. These new results suggest that worlds with potential for life might be more common than we thought.

University of Arizona, Tucson, astronomer Michael Meyer and his colleagues used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to determine whether planetary systems like ours are common or rare in our Milky Way galaxy. They found that at least 20 percent, and possibly as many as 60 percent, of stars similar to the sun are candidates for forming rocky planets.

and from the Australian University of Sydney[*3] :

Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy – a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across – is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.

The Bad Astronomy blog[*4] does the math, using the pre-Sydney study total of 100 billion stars in the galaxy:

As it happens, about 10% of the stars in the Milky Way can be categorized as sun-like, which is about 10 billion stars. If 10% of them have rocky planets, as this study indicates, then there may be a billion Earths orbiting stars in our galaxy alone! And that’s only for stars like the Sun; lower mass stars also can form planetary systems, and there are far more of them then stars like the Sun. It is entirely possible that there are many billions of terrestrial planets in the galaxy… and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe.

So, the Next Big Future folks took the billion Earth-like planets suggested by the Bad Astronomy people and multiplied by two.  Voila!  Two billion Earths!  Maybe more . . .

The Man Behind The Curtain

Who’s the puppeteer who seems to be increasingly pulling the strings of American politics?

George Soros.

A guy who made his billions cynically manipulating world currencies[*1] .

A guy who’s money is behind MoveOn.org[*2] , People for the American Way, and a plethora of other leftist organizations.

A guy who funded John McCain’s Reform Institute[*3] .

You really have to ask yourself if George Soros has the best interests of the average American citizen in mind.  I, personally, don’t.  I think he’s just graduated from manipulating currencies to manipulating political systems, all in order to increase his personal profit and power.  That’s what I think.

Does this sound at all familiar?

Their agenda included minimum wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital and “rigidly secular” schools.

Is Thomas Sowell[*1] writing about the Democrats?  Well, perhaps.  In a way.  Some Republicans, too.

Also, the Italian Fascists of Mussolini[*2] :

The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free market economy. Their agenda included minimum wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital and “rigidly secular” schools.

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run. They were for “industrial policy,” long before liberals coined that phrase in the U.S.

I hope and pray that this year’s election in the U.S. will not be a choice between full-blown fascism (Democrats, either Hillary or Obama) and fascism-light (McCain Republicanism).