NASA: Hotbed of Sin

Back in the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo days, NASA only had a few men to keep tabs on. They worked hard to put on the appropriate public image as family men (or the occasional bachelor enjoying his free time). NASA has carefully cultivated the image of the magical space traveler, and with so many applicants from which to choose, one would think they would get the best of the best. Now the astronaut corps includes 97 of both genders. Humans being humans, we get the occasional glimpse behind the veneer. It takes people who are driven to become astronauts, and when you're driven, sometimes you get driven the wrong direction - like for that hot co-worker.

Murder, she wrote, says the prosecutor. Why didn't she just push the other astronaut out the airlock?

The Smoking Gun, of course, has the actual charges.

Free speech salvo

On Friday, Arizona police arrested a 64-year-old man — a fugitive since 2001 in a bizarre war that mixes free speech, copyright law, and the Church of Scientology.

So this guy gets on a conversation group on the internet and acts like he wants to procure a "Tom Cruise Missile" in a verbal slight against the Church of Scientology. He's charged with interfering with a church. Excuse me? Maybe picketing the street in front of a church would be interfering, but online banter?

Funny - he did picket, and follow members. But still, where do you draw the line? "Odd behavior," as folks in that article keep harping on, must be tolerated until it infringes on the rights of others, otherwise we're legislating conformity.

Save the planet - ride a bus

In the words of yesterday's N&O headline, "Panel Blames Warming on Man." Well arrest him, already! Seriously - we have known for years that there was some dramatic climate change underway, and the primary controversy has been due to corporate-funded disinformation campaigns. ($16 million in financing for the campaigns and Exxon Mobil is frequently mentioned among the perpetrators.) But what kind of change is it?

2006 was one of the hottest years on record, state by state[1]. Man is responsible for the change[2]. If you shut down the Gulf Stream by melting the Greenland ice sheets, the whole North Atlantic area (England and Europe come to mind) suddenly drops 9 degrees C[3]. Melt all that ice and where does it go? Into the ocean, of course, raising the sea level and changing the coastline dramatically[4]. Is it any wonder I don't live on today's coast?

We need to undertake a coordinated effort to address our greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is one such effort, to which most countries agreed, with Australia and the United States the most notable shirks and among the worst polluters, too. The United States is 17th in the world in per-capita oil consumption [5] and first in oil consumption as a country [6]. We need to figure out how to conserve. Hint: not by using hydrogen fuel cells. They are hopelessly inefficient, especially when charged by electricity from a coal or oil generating plant.[7] We need to genuinely conserve, and one of the best ways we can do that is by public transit.

I had an interesting conversation with a staunch Republican friend of mine not too long ago about the price of gas. My premise, for the sake of the discussion, was that gasoline should be taxed to a cost of $5/gallon (brought there gradually), and the revenue generated should be put into establishing usable public transit systems. Her argument was that it was a regressive tax unfairly targeting the poor. (That and taxes and government are bad in the first place.) What if the public transit were genuinely efficient? Then the automobile would become a rich man's convenience and the train, bus, and other transit would be for the common folk. A subway ride in Mexico City costs 15 cents. Why not have bargains like that here?

When I lived and worked on a bus route, I took the bus to work. With my present job location, it would turn a 15 minute commute into a 1-hour ordeal to take the bus, so I drive or ride my bicycle. Biking and public transit is my personal answer to the climate change problem, that and NC Green Power to offset CO2 emissions from my electricity usage. What do you do?

Most bus systems have their schedules online for easy reference. Some, like TTA, even have door-to-door routing. You tell it when and where you want to go, and it tells you which buses, which changes, and even how long you'll spend walking. TTA's routing system even includes routing with the various city transit systems in the area. Very convenient.

Count the votes

Finally someone with authority has gotten the message that unless you can actually re-count the vote, there's no sense in having fancy voting machines. In the two counties where I've lived, I've been fortunate to have mark-sense ballots - mark a sheet of paper to fill in the box or connect the arrow. Alas, not everyone is so fortunate, and were I to have to vote on an ATM, I would be complaining to the elections board at every opportunity. Rebecca Mercuri was one of the first electronic voting experts on the news after the 2000 election heist, and she has steadfastly recommended the Mercuri method of voting: regardless of the means by which the voter expresses intent, have them verify it on a piece of paper that goes into the ballot box for re-counting should that become necessary. BlackBoxVoting.org is a repository of related information.

Fun & Games

My neighbor, at my request, offers instructions on how to configure the ThinkPad to use the built-in 2D accelerometer for gaming, like tilting the table in NeverBall, at left, instead of the simple boring hard drive protection system. Amit Singh gives the instructions for a MacBook Pro. Props to abaxter for putting it all together.

Drug dealers

I count among my friends people who pay the mortgage courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry. That said, I still have to wonder where this world is headed.

Wired News offers a Requiem for the Silver Bullet, explaining that private pharmas won't make new antibiotics because there's no money in it, and this leads to thousands of needless deaths annually. Too bad people don't have to take antibiotics for the rest of their lives.

Consumer Reports suggests that you can save money with generic drugs (duh), even as pharmas push new medicines that do essentially the same thing as the older drugs. What would you do with $4 billion? They market directly to the patient. It's true that one medicine may work better than another of the same class based on a particular patient's quirks, but when I go to the doctor and tell him the generic drug works great and he offers me scrips for brand-name alternatives and lectures me on the benefits of brand-name drugs, I switch doctors. I want a doctor who puts my health above that of the drug companies.

Indian culture on the IMAX screen

Independent Weekly has a review of Mystic India, a new IMAX film showing at Exploris in Raleigh. They say the narration is corny, the typical IMAX swooping is missing, but there are some fantastic views of architecture. "Unity in diversity" sounds like what I've encountered so far working with folks on that side of the globe.