- The majority of scientists believe a flood of biblical proportions occurred on Mars.
- Those same scientists don't believe in a flood of biblical proportions on Earth.
- Earth is mostly covered by water
- Mars has no liquid water
All content on this blog from Tim McGhee has moved to the Tim McGhee Substack, and soon, Lord willing, will be found only on that Substack.
The Indianapolis 500 is hardly the place you'd expect to find anything "green," outside of the starting flag. The cars in the annual race average 220 mph and get 2 to 3 miles per gallon. But this year, they'll be burning rubber on ethanol...
This is a big change for the Indy 500 — the last time the race switched fuels (to unleaded) was back in 1965. ...
Indy driver Jeff Simmons says the fuel switch is anything but a gimmick, citing the environmental and economic benefits of ethanol. "If our engineers had said, 'hey, this isn't a high performance fuel,' we wouldn't be running it." ..
The high-performance race cars will not be running on 100 percent pure ethanol. The reason? Two percent gas had to be added to the mix, otherwise it would have been considered pure grain alcohol and subject to liquor tax.
Mr. Brownback is not the only one who benefits from this announcement.ABC News' Julia Bain Reports: Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback, R-Kan., announced Thursday he has received the endorsement of Norma McCorvey aka "Jane Roe" in the landmark 1973 abortion case Roe v. Wade.
Since the case, McCorvey has reversed her stance on abortion and, in a statement released by the campaign, the former abortion rights plaintiff cites Brownback's long record on the controversial issue as the basis for her support.
For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.
The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head.
Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. ...
But given the museum’s unwavering insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the believer?
In the museum’s portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun.
But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses?
The LORD said to Moses, "Is the LORD's power limited? Now you shall see whether My word will come true for you or not" (Numbers 11:23).
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
... videoconferencing as never seen before ...The first comment on this story is hilarious:
She works for Cisco, maker of an $80,000 single-screen system. It's so real that people seem to forget Hooshmand is 1,800 miles away.
Hooshmand became an early user of the technology when she moved from California to Texas and her boss, Martin De Beer, didn't want to lose her.
"I can see her through the window when I sit at my desk," said De Beer, vice president of Cisco's emerging markets technology group.
Hooshmand manages De Beer's workload as if she's right next door, with him hardly noticing she's half a continent away.
For businesspeople who have long wished they could be in two places at once, technology is making that almost a reality. The cost may be high — but for big companies, the savings in airline tickets from here to there can make the system almost pay for itself.
You think we can get this to work in Mexico? Then we'll just have the Illegals on our laptops.Hence the headline!
Translation:MANCHESTER, N.H., May 19 -- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois used a commencement speech here Saturday to challenge graduates to rise above cynicism and selfishness, while in New Orleans, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York used a similar occasion to pledge a renewed federal commitment to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The speeches by the two leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination underscored the basic differences in their campaigns:
- Obama offering words of inspiration and hope for a new politics of citizen engagement that can transform the country, and
- Clinton providing a blueprint for putting government to work to deal with the problems afflicting ordinary Americans.
Clinton: the government should work for the peopleI have to agree with Obama on this one.
Obama: the people should work for the people
The shuttle Atlantis' hail-damaged external fuel tank has been repaired, NASA officials said today, clearing the shuttle for rollout to launch pad 39A next week. ... Rollout to the launch pad is scheduled to begin at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, May 16.Why so early? What's the matter with 8 a.m.? Maybe NASA just has a lot of morning people. That just made me laugh.
NASA managers had hoped to launch Atlantis on mission STS-117, the first of five planned 2007 shuttle flights, March 15. But during a freak storm that thundered over the launch pad on Feb. 26, the shuttle's external tank was blasted by hail, suffering thousands of pits and gouges in its foam insulation. Wind gusts reached 62 knots and hail up to 1.5 inches in diameter was found at the pad.Can you imagine a pencil sharpener the size of the shuttle's external tank?! I can just see the headline now: NASA Fixes Shuttle with World's Largest Pencil Sharpener!
... Of that total, between 1,400 and 1,500 were tightly clustered at the very tip of the tank near its carbon composite nose cap. Rather than make individual repairs in that area, a broad area of foam was sanded down to eliminate the pits and then filled in with sprayed-on insulation. That fresh insulation was then milled to the proper slope and to an acceptable thickness by a cleverly engineered "pencil sharpener" device that rotated about the top of the tank.
To make sure the required repairs could stand up to the aerodynamic and thermal rigors of launch, engineers re-assessed the flight performance of past PDL repairs, simulated damage sites using steel balls to impart hail-like crush forces and then subjected repairs to a hot-gas wind tunnel at Marshall.In other words, the job of the guys at Huntsville is to re-create (a) the hailstorm, and then (b) liftoff conditions.
During the first 110 seconds of ascent, atmospheric friction raises the tank's temperature to some 650 degrees in some places and heating continues throughout the climb to space. Along with thermal concerns, foam debris falling off the tank could threaten a Columbia-type impact to Atlantis' heat shield.I knew there was a lot of heat on re-entry, but I didn't realize there was also heat (though not nearly as much) on exiting the lower atmosphere.
"As you accelerate this vehicle supersonically in the lower atmosphere, you build up quite a bit of heat, several hundred degrees," Hale said. "But you increase in temperature all the way up and even in second stage, when you are almost at orbital altitudes, you continue to put heat in.
The hail storm, Chapman said, "left the external tank team with a tremendous amount of work to do. This team has been essentially working 24/7 since the storm, doing engineering analysis, testing and repair of the tank. In my estimation, they have done a fantastic job. This has truly been unique. We've had hail damage before, but never to this magnitude."Bravo to the hard workers at NASA. That's 75 days these hundreds of folks have been working on the external tank!
But Chapman cautioned that shuttle watchers should be prepared for a somewhat strange-looking tank when Atlantis heads for the pad next week. The foam used for the large-area sprays and the PDL-type repairs is a much lighter color than the insulation sprayed on at the factory.That would be me. I'm guessing it will be reminiscent of the VAB building and the patchwork done there after the 2004 hurricanes.
Launch is targeted for 7:37:56 p.m. on June 8.Countdown to launch: T-minus 27 days!
NASA plans to hold a two-day flight readiness review May 30 and 31 to assess the status of launch preparations and to set an official launch date.
Assuming a rollout to the pad on May 16, engineers will only have three contingency days between then and June 8 to deal with unexpected problems.
A two-month appropriation assumes that the Department of Defense, first of all, has a precise idea, in real time, of the balances in thousands of accounts that we have to manage.
In truth, I essentially have 10,000 faucets all running money. And some of them run at one rate; some of them run at another. And they all draw on one big pool of money behind them.
Turning them on and off with precision and on a day-to-day basis or even a month-to-month basis, gets very difficult. I think the bill – the proposal – also assumes financial and cash flow controls, a precision in those controls, day-to-day would require a degree of agility that is not normally associated with the Department of Defense.
During yesterday's meeting, Arlington officials pressured JBG executives to provide free admittance to the observation deck to county residents two days a week. Initially, no one would be charged admission, but following that initial period, non-county residents would be.
How much isn't clear. A planning department document suggested $3 a person, but officials were told that other sights offering spectacular vistas, such as the Empire State Building in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago, also privately owned, charge as much as $15.
While many websites do not collect names, addresses, Social Security numbers or other "personally identifiable information," or PII, the information they do collect is extremely revealing. "They don't need to know your name to know who you are," Chester said.
...
Carnegie Mellon Professor Latanya Sweeney has demonstrated that one can identify 87 percent of the U.S. population from zip code, birth date and gender alone.
...
Other than the privacy issues, some obvious risks are price discrimination, segmented markets and creating an ability for advertisers to exercise improper influence over consumers.Economists tend to like price discrimination, because it allows wealthier purchasers to subsidize sales to poor customers, while maximizing profits.
Consumers hate knowing that the person sitting next to them on the airplane paid hundreds of dollars less because they booked a day earlier.
Purchasers might actually rebel if the reason they paid more for the same service was because the seller thought they had more disposable income than their seatmate. Perhaps for this reason alone, I think widespread price discrimination is unlikely.
...Personalization, including targeted ads, is a mixed blessing: on one hand, personalized information is more useful and relevant to our lives.
On the other, it reduces the opportunities for unanticipated encounters with ideas, people or products that may disturb or enlighten us.
Personalization also interferes with the development of common experiences that people can use to understand each other and make common decisions.
“I don’t want to get Max Baucus in trouble, but he’s been one of the reasonable Democrats,” said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “He understands it takes bipartisan agreement to move forward. I wish more of his conference would follow his example.”
"Two moderate factions — the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition — together outnumber the 70-member Progressive Caucus, with about 75 combined members.
"More than 80 Democrats are unaligned."