11:00 pm
( exercise )
Reading an obit with great pleasure
By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)
Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.
McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.
( Read more... )
The Obama administration announced May 7 the launch of an independent review of planned U.S. human space flight activities. The review is being conducted by a committee of experts chaired by Norman Augustine, a highly regarded former aerospace industry executive. The committee will examine NASA's human space flight development plans and potential alternatives. The panel will present options in August for ensuring the nation's human space flight program continues as a safe, innovative, sustainable and affordable operation following the retirement of the space shuttle.
To view the committee's charter, membership, presentations, schedule and other activities, visit: http://hsf.nasa.gov
She hasn't posted in over 5 years. I suspect she won't post again. But on this day 12 years ago, 4 July 1997, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pathfindress landed on Mars and the Sojurner rover began its exploration of the red planet. Designed for a one month mission lifetime, she set the standard for over achievement continued by later Mars rovers, operating until 27 Sep 1997. At that point the mission controllers at JPL lost contact with her, and she's only been heard from via livejournal since then.
Four Reasons Women Dig Geeks
My friend Sandy Antunes pointed this article out in his Daytime Astronomer blog today, and I figured I'd pass the link along.
When your rover has abundant energy but can't go anywhere, what's a scientist to do? How about making observations of the evening and night skies on Mars? With the benefit of a boost in electrical power from a wind gust cleaning off her solar panels, the Spirit rover has more energy available than she's had for a couple of years. But unfortunately, Spirit is stuck in a patch of loose soil in the Home Plate region on Mars. While the engineers at JPL work hard at figuring out how to "Free Spirit" (see the new website dedicated to their efforts) scientists are making observations of her surroundings to aid in the effort to get her out. But there's also enough power to do additional observations, and astronomy was a logical choice. "Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers," said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. "We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters." Besides, Lemmon added, using all the energy in the daytime might lead to overheating.
spiritrover may recall that she's done this before. Back in 2005 Spirit made astronomical observations that were eventually written up in Sky & Telescope. The imaging instruments aboard Spirit allow for some pretty good basic observations of bright and variable stars. Spirit isn't going to discover any new galaxies, but she's capable of adding to the body of knowledge about how stars and planets appear through Mars' very different atmosphere. Ageing solar probe to be taken off life support
29 June 2009 by Rachel Courtland
Ground controllers will pull the plug on the solar probe Ulysses on Tuesday, ending an epic mission that has lasted more than 18 years.
Ulysses launched in October 1990 and swung past Jupiter in 1992, putting it into an orbit that crosses the sun's poles – the first and only spacecraft ever to do so.
Over its lifetime, the probe has flown through three comet tails, studied the magnetic fields around the sun and Jupiter, and found interstellar dust blowing through the solar system.
NASA and the European Space Agency, which jointly operate the mission, had earlier predicted that Ulysses would die in 2008, when low power threatened to freeze the probe's remaining fuel. But the spacecraft team managed to prevent that from happening by firing its hydrazine-powered thrusters every two hours.
But the probe's fuel is running low, and the space agencies have decided to turn off its transmitter, which allows it to send data back to Earth, on Tuesday. "We'd already gone a year more than we thought we could, so we thought it would be a good time to get out," says Ed Massey of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and NASA project manager for Ulysses.
ISS Expedition 21 crew poster. Click on the picture to see other mission posters.
GOES-O Mission Lifts Off!
Sun, 28 Jun '09
NASA/NOAA's GOES-O satellite atop a Delta IV rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 6:51 p.m. EDT. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite Program (GOES) is a joint effort of NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
More at the link.
Congratulations to the entire GOES-O team, including several of my friends from past missions who are going to be very busy for the next 90 days as they commission GOES O to be GOES 14. (The GOES missions change from letter designators to number designators when they reach their operational orbits.)
10 years ago today we launched FUSE. Thus began a mission that lasted until 18 October 2007, observing nearly 3000 astronomical objects and accumulating 64 million seconds of science data.
A lot of things have happened in those ten years. The FUSE mission was a good part of them.
Happy Successful Male Transmitter of Genetic Information Day
To every man who has managed to contribute to the propogation of the species and/or has voluntarily agreed in a legally binding sense to keep a genetically unrelated child from being consumed by wolves or leprechauns or whatever: Good on you. Have a day.
graceful_chaos and ladyalafair. Also my partner in the transmission of genetic information, pagawne.WASHINGTON, June 19 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama Friday marked the 144th anniversary of Juneteenth, the day enslaved African Americans in Texas learned they were free.
All the years I lived in Texas this was a big day of celebrations. Happy Juneteenth to all.
It's a high resolution view of a sunspot. Click on the picture to read about it at Universe Today.
( exercise )
This is my first time since last weekend that I've been able to get out and walk or run any significant distance. I know I've gotten in a quarter mile here and there at work this past week, but I didn't even have time to record it and at this point I don't feel like going back and trying to figure it all out. I doubt it's going to prevent me from reaching 1000 miles this year.
I came down with a summer cold early in the week. Through the miracle of Zicam I seem to be mostly past it now. Sleeping until noon today probably also helped. I've been pushing pretty hard at work all week.
Conducted a "dry run" yesterday of the Mission Day One activities we intend to simulate during the upcoming mission rehearsal. We've done all the things we did before, but not in this precise order. Without going into too much detail, I'll allow as how it was a "learning experience" on several levels. Two people are tasked with getting "go forward" plans to me by COB Tuesday to explain how they're going to work around the problems that cropped up. The first mission rehearsal starts on Monday the 22nd and runs through that week. I feel pretty good about the ability of the team and the simulator to do reasonable simulations of normal operations. The launch day simulations are another story right now.
From The Onion, of course.
Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
I…I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and—oh, no! For the love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!
Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!
Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!
All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you've got!
Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for it. C'mon…c'mon…yes, it's going for it! Now hit it with the thing that one guy told us once while it's distracted by our ludicrous rationalizations!
Todays Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is exceptionally good. I don't often link to the APOD, since I figure those of you who are interested in such things already look at them, and those of you who aren't just don't. But for the perhaps not inconsiderable readership who wouldn't otherwise look but are interested in the dynamics of black hole systems, today's APOD of the Cygnus X-1 system, with the wonderful overlay explaining the dynamics of jets powered by accretion disks, is well worth your time.
I had not known until today about Ely S. Parker. In addition to being the last Grand Sachem of the Seneca Tribe, he was also an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, and eventually attained the rank of Brigadier General. When Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869, he named Parker as his Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker was instrumental in the creation and execution of Grant's Peace Policy, enlisting Quakers as Indian Agents to replace agents appointed by previous administrations.
It's interesting to me that living now in a time which considers itself more enlightened than the mid 19th century, I see greater opposition to the appointment of Judge Sonia Sotomayor than Grant got for his appointment of a man who had once been refused admission to the New York state bar because he was an Indian, even though he'd met all the written qualifications for admission. The more I study the 19th century the more I realize that the people who lived then were at least as astute as we are today, and not blind to the problems of their time. Our popular notions of their shortcomings do us and them both a disservice.
The Last Comanche Chief -- The Life and Times of Quanah Parker by Bill Neeley.
This is a good biography of Quanah Parker, the war chief of the Quahadi band of the Comanche people who eventually brought them onto the reservation and worked tirelessly to get his people the financial and spiritual benefits promised them in the treaty he agreed to. It verges a bit on hagiography, and that's not especially surprising given Bill Neeley's relationship with the modern day Comanche nation. Neeley has a close personal relationship with James M. Cox, the grandson of Quanah Parker and a former Chairman of the Comanche Nation. So the book is factually quite accurate, but presents Quanah Parker in the best light. For a somewhat more evenhanded look at Parker, including the complaints many other Comanche leaders had about him, I'd recommend Tom Fehrenbach's book Comanches -- The History of a People.
All that said, this is still a book well worth reading for anyone interested in the history of interactions between the US Government and the native American tribes. Quanah Parker was a transformative figure in Comanche history, and he remains an important historical presence for those wishing to understand the interaction between the Comanche people and the white American settlers who came into Texas and who clashed so violently with the Comanches.
The son of Quahadi chief Peta Nocona and the captured white woman Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah (fragrant) Parker was the product of a union between mortal enemies. Parkers Fort in Texas was an outpost of the Parker family, an extended family of hardcore southern Baptists who felt they had a God-given right to the land they held. Following the Quahadi raid on Parkers Fort, Cynthia Ann Parker became Nauduh, assimilated fully into the Quahadi tribe, and eventually became a wife of Peta Nocona. She bore him two sons and a daughter. Cynthia Ann was recaptured by Texas Ranger Captain Sullivan Ross in a raid and returned to her family. The reunion was not as successful as might have been hoped, and she spent years pining for the life she had known with her husband and children. She and her daughter Prairie Flower both eventually died in what can only be called captivity.
Quanah became war chief of the Quahadi, and led them through the final Plains Wars against the US Cavalry. After Colonel Ranald McKenzie captured the Quahadi horse herd in Palo Duro Canyon and had all the horses shot, Quanah realized that he had to either bring his people to the reservation at Fort Sill in Indian Territory or watch them starve, since the buffalo were gone. So he made one of the hardest decisions a war leader can make and led his people into a life they didn't want, but one that would allow them to survive. He began the practice of charging Texas cattlemen 'grass rent' for trailing their herds across Indian Territory, bringing considerable wealth to his people in the process. He eventually became a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who came to Oklahoma several times to hunt with Quanah. He also repeatedly dealt with Congressional Committees intent on taking promised things away from the Comanches, developing alliances with other Indian advocates and obtaining specific land grants of 480 acres for each Comanche family in addition to a $2.5 million settlement for broken treaty promises.
Founder of the Native American Church, Quanah obtained legal protection for all Indians engaged in the peyote ritual and legal recognition of polygamy among Indians. The book relates an anecdote about some minister in Washington D.C. chastising Quanah for the evils of polygamy. Quanah told him that he should pick out the one wife that he thought should stay, and try to tell all Quanah's other wives to go. The conversation ended there.
Since Quanah Parker's death, the Comanche Nation has called its elected leader the Chairman of the Comanche Nation. Quanah was the last Comanche Chief.
GHAZNI, Afghanistan — Capt. Kirk Black, who trains the Afghan police in this impoverished province, developed a practiced skepticism about claims of innocence during a decade as a Baltimore police officer.
But last January, when relatives of an Afghan imprisoned at the Bagram military detention center begged him to look into the case, he agreed to listen. Eventually he became convinced that the detention was a case of mistaken identity and put the family in touch with a lawyer.
Soon, Captain Black was facing a potential legal battle of his own. One of his senior commanders ordered him not to discuss the case, and the military sent an officer to investigate him. He retained military defense counsel.
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