!!!

YouTube - Inspired Bicycles - Danny MacAskill April 2009

ROBERT GATES, the secretary of defense, has proposed a budget overhaul that will go a long way toward improving our national security, but more can be done to meet his long-term goal: creating the right military for the 21st century.

Not since Henry Stimson’s tenure from 1940 to ’45 has a defense secretary been faced to the same degree with simultaneously fighting a war and carrying out far-reaching reforms. Yet there are three major changes Mr. Gates should add to his agenda, and they deserve President Obama’s support.

First, the Air Force should be eliminated, and its personnel and equipment integrated into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Second, the archaic “up or out” military promotion system should be scrapped in favor of a plan that treats service members as real assets. Third, the United States needs a national service program for all young men and women, without any deferments, to increase the quality and size of the pool from which troops are drawn.

Op-Ed Contributor - Up, Up and Out - NYTimes.com

In all liklihood, this is the last time 2 shuttles will be at the pad at the same time.

photo: Atlantis and Endeavour at the pad

The Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board, whose previous coverage of the Minnesota recount has tended to reflect a lack of command of the facts and circumstances of the case, is now back for another round, this time pressing for a re-vote:

538 update on the Coleman/Franken debacle.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: When Does 'Close' Become Too-Close-to-Call?

The Oracle Corporation, the technology information company, announced Monday that it would acquire a rival, Sun Microsystems, for $9.50 a share, or about $7.4 billion.

Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - NYTimes.com

The idea is simple. Find a way of removing an oxygen atom from a CO2 molecule and you are left with carbon monoxide (CO). From there it is but a short step to hydrocarbon riches. Mix CO with hydrogen, pass the mixture over a catalyst, and out comes liquid hydrocarbon fuel. This reaction, called the Fischer-Tropsch process, was invented as long ago as the 1920s.

...

The idea of using solar energy to convert CO2 into a carbon-based fuel is being taken a step further by Gabriele Centi at the Department of Industrial Chemistry and Engineering of Materials at the University of Messina, Italy. Rather than producing CO with a view to turning that into something more useful, he is building an electrochemical cell that produces hydrocarbon molecules such as nonane and ethylene - important chemical building blocks for plastics and other materials currently derived from oil.

Centi's cell is a distant cousin of the fuel cells that generate electricity by reacting hydrogen or methanol with oxygen, but with the chemical reaction running in reverse. On one side of the cell is a titanium dioxide catalyst that encourages water molecules to split when hit by photons of sunlight, producing hydrogen ions and oxygen gas. The hydrogen ions migrate through a proton exchange membrane to the other side of the cell, where a catalyst containing platinum nanotubes facilitates the reaction with CO2 to produce hydrocarbons.

From March, 2008. This would create a closed carbon cycle. The more time goes by, the more I think this is what we actually need. A biotech answer is fungus that makes diesel.

Turning CO2 back into hydrocarbons - environment - 03 March 2008 - New Scientist

"On Tuesday's "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central, astronaut Sunita Williams announced that NASA — which always maintained it had the right to choose an appropriate name — would not name the node after Colbert.

Instead, Node 3 will henceforth be called Tranquility, the eighth most popular response submitted by respondents in the poll. The node's name alludes to where Apollo 11 landed on the moon — the Sea of Tranquility.

NASA and Colbert compromised by naming a treadmill used for exercising in space after Colbert. NASA, itself an acronym (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), often names things so they spell out something fun. And that's what they did with the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT)."

Tranquility Node to Colbert Treadmill | NASA Watch

As the company envisions the system, a nonpaying reader on a magazine or newspaper site would reach a certain point and see a page asking for payment — the Journalism Online system, operating within the publication’s Web site. But a reader who wanted a subscription to multiple sites would go directly to the new company’s own site.

“The most important thing is it’s simple to use,” Mr. Brill said in an interview. “Much of the barrier to charging online is the transaction friction, as opposed to the actual cost. With this system, you’d have a single password, give your credit card number just once.”

He said that for the unlimited subscriptions, “we’re playing with a figure of $15 a month.”

Media Executives Plan Online Service to Charge for Content - NYTimes.com

A plausible solution would be to re-energize NASA’s development of nuclear-powered rockets, with the intention of building a craft able to send clusters of micro-bots into deep space at velocities of, say, one-tenth light speed. Depending on financing and our ability to garner international cooperation, these probes could be sent off before the 21st century starts to wane. By the middle of the following century, on-the-scene data from Epsilon Eridani, the nearest known planetary system, could be in our hands.

Op-Ed Contributor - Boldly Going Nowhere - NYTimes.com

Time Warner Cable plans to test its controversial, new scheme to have users pay by the gigabyte in Rochester, New York, but the area's freshman congressman calls usage caps greedy and plans to introduce legislation to stop it.

New York Democratic Representative Eric Massa called TWC's proposal to switch its 8.4 million cable broadband customers to metered internet billing an "outrageous plan to tax the American people."

Congressman To Introduce Anti-Download Cap Bill | Epicenter from Wired.com