Replace most of NASA with Space Prizes

Jerry Pournelle

“Mission for NASA: Become the national Space Prize organization. Congress appropriates $2 billion a year, relatively trivial amounts; NASA sets up prize committees, stores up the money, and gives it away as prizes. It doesn’t fund anything, it doesn’t need large staffs, it needs some bright people to come up with prize objectives and definitions, judges to determine that the prize objectives have been met, and someone to sign the checks for winners. Nothing else.” Jerry Pournelle, h/t Instapundit.

Jerry Pournelle adds: Now some of the NASA centers may be worth preserving. JPL is one of them, and I am sure there are still some good facilities at Ames. The launch facility at Canaveral needs to be kept operational. It may even be that some NASA research should be funded directly. X Projects still make sense. But for the most part NASA should operate as NACA did, not as an operational agency.

Every government program has cash payouts. 

Make the payouts competitive instead of crony capers.

Also h/t Instapundit:  Rand Simberg: Shuttlyndra And Bipartisan Crony Capitalism.

"Occupy Wall Street" has the Pirate Party beat for outrageous free stuff. Canada next, 2012 Agitprop.

I thought the Pirate Party in Berlin had a goofy free-stuff platform.  That was before "Occupy Wall Street" came up with something big to believe in.  Version One has thirteen demands:

$20/hour minimum wage,

but a guaranteed income even if you don't work.

Free college education

and cancellation of all debts everywhere, starting with student loans,  

credit card balances and home mortgages and going to all international debt too.
Single payer healthcare and outlaw all private healthgivers.

Block free trade, make it way easier to unionize.

Forget about the border fence.  In fact, forget about borders too.  Just open things up.

No more credit reports.

And so on.

One little ray of light:  Honest counting of secret paper ballots.

And another:  Like spaghetti being flung at a wall to see what sticks, the platform hasn't actually been adopted.

h/t Gateway Pundit

h/t Small Dead Animals which links 2 stories for planned protests in Toronto and Montreal.




h/t Instpundit, quoting Professor Jacobson:

 “#OccupyWallStreet is organized agitprop designed to deflect attention from the Obama administration’s failings onto ‘Wall Street,’ although many of the participants don’t understand how they are being used. The Washington Post now is fully aboard Team Obama, doing its best to take down Rick Perry this week, next week someone else. AxelPlouffe messaging is all class warfare all the time, and will be for the next 13 months.”

Added:  "The movement has at least one major obstacle to becoming a political force — the administration it would protest is on its side".  Hot Air.
My favorite comment at Small Dead Animals: "It seems to me this is all about canceling student debt for people who chose the wrong majors".

An American Renaissance is coming when Obama goes. Relief and a vigor unseen in decades.

Victor David Hanson:  "Why then do I see blue sky and a break in the present storms?"  He gives six reasons for a resurgence of America when Obama departs.  An economic boom in the US is good for its neighbors.

Professor V.D. Hanson

1.  The constitution tends always towards stable government and respecting it will be in vogue again.

2.  Fracking, new oil and gas reserves, and a friendly administration will add millions of jobs and end reliance on enemies for fuel.

3.  Private enterprise has been accumulating cash reserves because of government-induced uncertainty.  When the costs of investment are known again,  business will supply pent-up consumer demand.

4.  People are calling b.s. on increasing debt, taxes and endless unemployment insurance. Government is not Tinkerbell's magic wand.

5.  Because the US tried making nice internationally without a payoff, leaders will re-accept that the US is a global power and stand up for its interests accordingly.   The bullies in the schoolyard will behave better.

6.  The US military is improved and unmatched in the world, better respected at home as well as abroad.  

Into the sunset.  Buh-bye

"     Still, let us cheer up a bit. The country always knew, but for just a bit forgot, that you cannot print money and borrow endlessly. It always knew that bureaucrats were less efficient than employers. It knew that Guantanamo was not a gulag and Iraq was not “lost.” But given the anguish over Iraq, the anger at Bush, the Obama postracial novelty and “centrist” façade, and the Freddie/Fannie/Wall Street collapse, it wanted to believe what it knew might not be true. Now three years of Obama have slapped voters out of their collective trance.
       The spell has now passed; and we are stronger for its passing. There is going to be soon a sense of relief that we have not experienced in decades. In short, sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades".

Canadian River Disappears

  Hikers came upon a dry river bed with icebergs up to sixty feet tall this August.  One of two feeds to BC's largest lake, Atlin Lake was blocked by an advance of the Juneau icefield.  As one resident said, "The maps will have to be redrawn a bit".

Lewellyn Inlet on the left has silt pouring into it.  Solko inlet on the left has none.

Related:  Hubbard Glacier advancing in Alaska, about to block a fjord. (220 miles NWW)

Noted:  Neither AGW nor a Permitorium were involved.  Mother Nature fast-tracked the approvals and no one was fined or jailed.

Sun explosion follows comet crash. Did the comet trigger this giant CME?

There's no known mechanism for a comet to cause a magnetic instability.  This is the second time scientists have been puzzled by what looks like a causal link.   The ten second gif of a coronagraph covers nine hours of action speeded up.  Posted October 3rd at Space Weather with some additional information.

On July 5, 2011, the unnamed comet appeared to interact with plasma and magnetic fields in its surroundings as it fell apart. Could a puny comet cause a magnetic instability that might propagate and blossom into a impressive CME? The question is not so crazy as it once seemed to be.

 
A coronagraph is a telescope that can see things very close to the Sun. It uses a disk to block the Sun's bright surface, revealing the faint solar corona, stars, etc.

World Economic Freedom: Britain once ruled eight of the top ten.

The 2011 top ten Index of Economic Freedom just released by the Heritage Foundation.  Canada sits at #6 and the US at #9.

There are ten components like "freedom from corruption" and "government size".

(The rest of the index and search options are available at the link.)

The world map of freedom as of 2010 from the Heritage Foundation:

From Bill Flax at Forbes:  

Many commentators will rightly deplore America’s precipitous descent over the past decade – down to tenth, yet another startling detail leaps from the page. Eight of the ten freest lands were once owned by Britain.

Related: Detail on the Corruption component: Bribe chart

Freight blimps on order for the High Arctic. UPDATES

Heavy-lifting blimp from DAI

A Canadian company is buying innovative blimps that can lift 50 tons and travel to the frozen north at 100 knots, staying aloft for several weeks at a time.  Hybrid Air Vehicles from the UK will be supplying the first of several by 2014 to Discovery Air Innovations of Canada (DAI).  It looks like a science fiction movie but it's real.

A little background on the topic here  and  here.  All-weather gravel roads in the north can cost over $1.5 million per mile.

h/t Brian Hall.

UPDATES
Canadian contract cancelled and opportunity shifts to Alaska
Something may be brewing in Manitoba.  Air ship test scheduled for October 2015.

Hairy Crazy Ants invade the south, video and story.

"Crazy" because they zip so fast, biters, and about 1/8th of an inch long, they've been detected since 2009 from Texas to Mississippi.  The AP story by Janet McConnaughey is quoted in Drudge but there's no video.  When Nylanderia pubens arrives, fire ants disappear.  Supplementary information from Kari Daquine of the Times Picayune.   They come from South America, were first seen in Florida in the fifties, group in colossal numbers and join the colonies of other species.  A few thousand on the motherboard of your computer will short it out.  They are called 'crazy' for their erratic motion, "like ants on speed".

Joe MacGowan

The clip below was recorded by McGowan, the Mississippi State University entomology museum curator quoted in Janet's story.  About the 1:55 mark, he puts his hand by the ants and in three seconds has sixty of them swarming his fingers.

Obama gets Vote of Non-Confidence.

Ed Morrissey

No one in either house has offered to co-sponsor the American Jobs Act on whose immediate passage President Obama staked his seriousness.  The bills found one sponsor in each house but without a co-sponsor, they are dead.  This is the closest Congress gets to a parliamentary vote of non confidence.

“We have a federal system, not a parliamentary system, so our legislature doesn’t take votes of no-confidence to force an executive out of power. But given the high-profile rollout of the AJA by Obama, including his demand for a joint session to escalate pressure for action, the lack of any co-sponsors on these bills is about as close as we’ll get to a vote of no confidence in this executive short of an outright floor-vote failure in the Senate on the bill.”

Quote from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air with h/t to Instapundit.

W.I.S.E. Asteroid survey complete. Fewer dangers and the tally of the biggest almost done.

The WISE survey has put sharp upper limits on asteroid numbers and has identified nearly every one that is more than 1 km. across and capable of global devastation.  Sourced at Science Daily News.

(L) Ready to launch    (R) Conception after launch

NASA launched WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) to survey the asteroid population at infrared wavelengths.  Dull objects that don't reflect light into regular telescopes become visible in infrared light and this heat signature depends on the asteroid's size, not on how shiny it is.  In the last year, WISE did two complete scans that identified more than one hundred thousand objects in the general population of the belt between Mars and Jupiter.   

Asteroids larger than 1 kilometer that could cause devastation on Earth had previously been estimated at one thousand objects but this survey implies the total will be close to 981, based on high-accuracy sampling of smaller areas.  To date we know where 911 of those presumed 981 are.  None represents a threat for the next few centuries.  (Related story: Asteroid won't hit earth but how close will Apophis come? Updated  )

The mid-size population between 100 meters and 1 kilometer in diameter had previously been estimated at 35,000 objects but the detailed sampling has tightened those numbers to about 19,500.  This size could devastate a city but wouldn't de-stabilize the globe like the one that put an end to the dinosaur age.  We've made progress and are now tracking just over 5,200 of these mid-sized asteroids.

The 10 to 100 meter population probably has a million objects, capable of delivering a nasty bump if they encounter earth.

The image on the left represents the less dangerous solar system environment now identified.
The dots representing asteroids are immensely exaggerated to be legible.

Current asteroids of interest are calendared at Spaceweather.com, listing any above 10 meters which come closer than one hundred times the distance from here to the moon.

Update:  But there are surprises.  This link provided by Spaceweather.com shows all new discoveries, updated daily. There were over 100 in 2011. A 14 meter asteroid was discovered to be passing at 0.2 lunar diameters only about three days before it arrived January 27th.  These "out of the blue" rocks are a small part of the total but can't be discounted.

Median age in each country of the world.

Charts Bin shows great differences between countries.  Canada, much of Europe and Japan have a median age over 40 and most of Africa has a median age under 20.  "Median" means half the population is older and half the population is younger than this number.  At the link, if you hover over a country, the age by sex will appear too.

How can a country prosper when there are almost no experienced adults around?
How can it prosper when a majority are pensioned off and out of the work force?
The TED lecture by Hans Rosling with animations reveal how rapidly life spans are increasing worldwide.  The best talk I have seen.  The muslim nations will be turning orange soon.

Woman hears her own voice for the first time in her life. How "Esteem" implant works.

I had some tears seeing her joy turn to tears.  Sometimes we get adjusted too well to living with just a little happiness and think it's our lot.  h/t Hot Air.  29 year old Sloan Churman, deaf from birth, had an "Esteem" hearing aid implanted surgically within her ear and then had it turned on.

This concept bypasses the ear drum and the three little bones.  An external microphone with a tiny processor sends signals directly to the cochlea where sensory hairs respond to the electrical stimulation.  Each hair specializes in a tone.  There's also an implanted battery good for nine years.  This is not for everyone and requires a problem-free inner ear.

A link to the Esteem home page which is oriented to sales.
A technical illustration from the Hearing Device Center. Click thru for additional explanations.

Hot Air Poll: Perry plunges, Cain is flavor of the week, Palin strong and steady.

Hot Air's October poll is out.  Palin support is unshakeable while Cain has soared like a rocket ship and Perry is falling off the radar.  This is the best center-right poll series.

The rest of the polling with VP choice (Rubio) and various matchups is at Hot Air.
If Christie joins the battle, you know there will be a rocket-ship poll for him like the one this week for Cain.  

Tsunami ark holds four

Sept. 30: Cosmo Power Co. President Shoji Tanaka
crawls out from a spherical earthquake and tsunami shelter "Noah"
made of fiber re- enforced plastic at the company's factory west of Tokyo.

Awesome, yes, but is it a good idea?  600 are on order. Remember the videos of cars bobbing and crashing in the tsunami?  This can keep you dry but it could be scary and give you a nasty tumble and bump. Also, earthquake protection and kids' playhouse.





As a reminder, a memorable tsunami video is shown below:

Raw footage of the Japan tsunami

Pop Bottle Solar Skylights in Tropical Tin Roofs

Brilliant and cheap solution to getting light into tropical buildings that have dark rooms in the day time. A 2 litre pop bottle is caulked into a hole in the metal roofing.  The bottle is filled with water and has some bleach added to keep the water clear. For free, enough light comes in to match  a 50W conventional bulb.  The inventor, Alfredo Moser, is a Brazilian engineer.  This generates jobs using junk and is catching on in the Philippines and Brazil.

The above clip is from Brazil and features the inventor.

The 3 minute clip linked here is from the Philippines and shows a neighborhood handyman who is making a living with these solar lights.

Twitter mining of world mood changes: Wired Science

Chart showing mood trends for every day of the week as revealed by Twitter language.
See article at Wired Science. Twitter-Mining Captures Global Mood Patterns

Beetle Fossil Colors (Wired Science)

Leaf beetle, Messel fossil pits, Germany.  Estimated age 47 million years.

See these astonishing photos.  The color is generated by interaction with nanometer-scale surface geometry, not by bouncing light off pigment chemicals which would not have survived.  The fossils formed in fine sediments that captured and preserved the light-altering surface textures.  Prehistoric Colors Preserved in Near-Perfect Beetle Fossils

Leaf beetle, Eckfeld, Germany.  Approximate age 40 million years.

Mercury: New photos show great lava flows, possible ice and unexplained pock marks.

Wired Science posts images from NASA's orbiting spacecraft, Messenger, that show huge lava flows likely carved the long channels and teardrop-shaped hills shown here. The lava may have come from volcanic vents seen in the lower-left image.

Ground-based radar has revealed very reflective material — much like water ice — sitting in deep craters at Mercury’s north pole.

Oddly shaped dips surrounded by very bright material, shown here in Mercury's Raditladi basin, are a brand-new puzzle. Scientists have so far identified about three dozen of these markings inside impact craters at all latitudes and terrains on the planet. But how they formed is still a mystery.

Click on Wired Science for more photos and detail.

US, Europe blame each other for debt crisis.

Easily embarrassed people are easier to trust and more generous.

If tripping in public or mistaking an overweight woman for a mother-to-be leaves you red-faced, don't feel bad. A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous. In short, embarrassment can be a good thing.
"Embarrassment is one emotional signature of a person to whom you can entrust valuable resources. It's part of the social glue that fosters trust and cooperation in everyday life," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer.

Distinct from Shame:  The moderate type of embarrassment they examined should not be confused with debilitating social anxiety or with "shame," which is associated in the psychology literature with such moral transgressions as being caught cheating.  While the most typical gesture of embarrassment is a downward gaze to one side while partially covering the face and either smirking or grimacing, a person who feels shame, as distinguished from embarrassment, will typically cover the whole face, Feinberg said.   

Science Daily News

Psychologist Dacher Keltner, a coauthor of the study,
demonstrates a typical gesture of embarrassment.