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After several days of warm weather (warm enough to melt rest of the snow on the driveway) we enjoyed a sudden plunge to -10F on Thursday evening. This was accompanied by a thick fog which seemed to be stunned by the sudden cold snap, freezing out on any convenient surface and turning the firs in particular into perfectly-flocked Christmas trees. Here’s a shot of the ridge behind the house from yesterday morning, showing the fog just beginning to lift:  Pretty, but brrrrrrr… Keith reports (with some derision) that Patrick Rhodes, deputy director at FEMA during the Katrina fiasco, has been picked up by NASA as a “senior advisor” of some sort at HQ. Pretty lame. I wonder if, as a political appointee, he was simply foisted on NASA (with Griffin’s fig-leaf “approval”) whether the agency wanted him or not. What exactly does a “senior advisor” to the administrator do, when that senior advisor has no known background in space or topics relevant to the agency? (Something tells me he’s going to spend his time on the 9th floor making coffee, playing solitaire on his PC, and text messaging his pals about how bored he is.) On the other hand, an underqualified political employee seeking refuge from his failures during Katrina in an office at NASA HQ is hardly as concerning as the voters of New Orleans reelecting the incompetent moron whose own pathetic bungling of the emergency makes everyone else’s pale in comparison. This suggests to me that doctorates are a bit easier to come by in Egypt than in the U.S.. More from early 2005 here, which I evidently missed the first time around:
Loopy space “science” and paranoia…someone should introduce him to Bruce! And still more, from March of last year:
It’d be amusing to poke around here to see if there is any further information on what exactly the good doctor is a doctor of, but unfortunately the site doesn’t load. I guess I’ll have to settle for reading more of Dick Teresi’s book, from which I am learning that so-called “Western” science was actually stolen from other cultures… Several people have asked me just how much snow we got up in the mountains over the past three weeks. This should give some idea:  This is my back deck after about three hours of shoveling — the hump under the window is a little deceptive…it was only about three feet deep over the deck, as indicated by the shovel marks. I spent about seven hours yesterday clearing 3-4′ of standing snow from the 100-foot-long driveway, and that with the help of a neighbor with a snowblower. Good thing the neighbor came along…the snowbanks were as tall as me, which made throwing the snow a lot more work than otherwise. Mind, this is standing snow…we actually received about eight feet in the past three weeks. While shoveling the driveway yesterday, I could from time to time see large sections of fluffy snow from Friday’s blizzard suddenly slump under their own weight under the warmth of the sun, increasing the density and decreasing the depth (as you might guess, it was a little harder shoveling today than yesterday because of this). Of course, it’s not all backbreaking work — the snow can actually be pretty (that’s the deck in the background, before shoveling):  The wraps are off Bezos’ Blue Origin. The one comment I haven’t seen made on this is that Blue Origin has in effect duplicated the DC-X program on private funds. Maybe now we’ll see where that approach could have gone had the DC-X program been continued, as so many wished it had been. More photos and video here. ADDENDUM: Phil Bowermaster notes the similarity to D.D. Harriman. I really need to start looking at the sky when I leave for work in the morning. A couple of weeks ago, it was a big meteor streaking across Aurora towards the Springs, and this past week it was not a meteor shower as originally reported, but a On the bright side, it’s one less bit of space garbage cluttering up the shipping lanes to orbit… Again, I’m late to the game on this: NASA seeks to reverse youth apathy to manned space exploration. Other’s have covered this issue in some detail, and have correctly observed that the real apathy is towards NASA’s efforts and not those of the emerging private sector, and that Whitesides’ suggestion that NASA provide a public personality is actually part of the problem, since it underlies to some degree the agency’s risk aversion (c.f. Christa McAuliffe). A little detail that caught my eye, though, was this suggestion on how to improve NASA’s “strategic communications efforts” (i.e.: PR):
Umm…you sure you guys wanna go with that? First off, David Duchovny’s association with space concerns UFOs and conspiracies in which the governments of the world collaborate with aliens, stuff that — while entertaining as fiction — makes the “moon hoax” lunacy referred to later in the article seem rational by comparison. And then there’s Captain Picard, last noted here pooh-poohing the very idea of going back to the moon and on to Mars. While it’s not surprising that a tentacle of the federal government would convene a giant powwow to brainstorm strategeries for thinking of ways to formulate approaches for addressing the issue, it is a little surprising that said tentacle would have 80 “message spinners”. (But only a little.) It’s sad that they only come up with the same old grandiose PR plans — if they were smart, they’d encourage bloggers who just happen to be working on elements of the VSE (ahem…) to provide the public with a daily, inside perspective on what is going on. Yes, that would appeal primarily to those who already have some interest in space exploration, but it would help to nurture that interest in ways that NASA’s boring, juvenile-oriented, and content-free web presence does not. Anyone notice what is wrong with Bruce’s caption to the picture in this post? (Hint: the man seated beside Bush is not an oil company executive.) |
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