I think Drew Curtis is overestimating the value of web commenters:

He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest “garbage.”

Neil Armstrong is not pleased with President Obama’s plans to cancel a return to the moon:

Moonwalk icon Neil Armstrong, in an open letter co-signed by Apollo Commanders James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, wrote on Tuesday that “The … decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.

“America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz (at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future) until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves. The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty….

“It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation,” the former astronauts wrote.

It’s a shame the program is being canceled, but with a federal deficit of 1.17 trillion it would have been difficult to fund (not that the deficit hasn’t prevented us from spending money on lots of other things we don’t need). Here’s hoping Obama’s successor will both get spending under control and reinstate the Constellation program.

That’s what some are saying:

But she said the film, which so far has the second-highest worldwide box-office gross ever, still reminded her of Hollywood’s “Pocahontas” story — “the Indian woman leads the white man into the wilderness, and he learns the way of the people and becomes the savior.”

“It’s really upsetting in many ways,” said Lee, who is black with Jamaican and Chinese ancestry. “It would be nice if we could save ourselves.”

I wondered if someone would bring this up when I saw the film, though I suspect having a human defect to the aliens had more to do with drama and introducing the alien culture through sympathetic eyes than reinforcing white supremacy.

James Cameron says the real message of the film is anti-imperialism and respect for the environment, though the fact that ‘Avatar’ is partnering with McDonald’s shows he’s full of crap on those points.

The website that allowed you to build your first website has expired:

Time is up for Yahoo Inc.’s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline.

GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom Web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents. It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet.

At the turn of the century, GeoCities was nearly ubiquitous. Fathers created websites about their families; kids created sites about Pokemon; teenage girls created sites about the Backstreet Boys. Practically every facet of culture was documented and thanks to search engines, easily accessible.

All of those documents are about to disappear.

A sad day for us who remember the days of dial up Internet. The website that would someday become this blog was hosted at Geocities in the early 2000s. In those days it seemed so cool and so modern to have a website, annoying pop up ads not withstanding. Sometimes I stumble on one of those sites and am reminded of what the Internet was like a decade ago. Amatuerish, yes, but real. Now the kids have Facebook and MySpace for such vanities, but Geocities remained as a monument to those who came before. It’s a shame Yahoo is taking them all down.

This article made me laugh:

Orly Taitz, the California attorney-dentist leading the charge of the so-called birthers movement, is boasting on her blog that she’s made some high-profile “friends” on Facebook: Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor and GOP Reps. Mary Bono Mack and Cynthia Lummis.

“I am in total disbelief and greatly honored,” Taitz wrote on her blog today after Cantor appeared as one of her Facebook “friends.” “To me it means that the leadership of the Republican party understands the importance of the issues and legal cases I brought forward…. “

Or, more likely, it means political figures just confirm all friend requests they receive without looking into the requester’s background (and how could they, given the number of friend requests they receive). Taitz doesn’t understand how Facebook works if she thinks this represents an endorsement of her ideas–and Politico apparently also fails to understand Facebook since they think this is newsworthy.

This sounds pretty cool:

The Large Hadron Collider will smash protons at nearly the speed of light inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel.

“It was first proposed more than 20 years ago,” said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). “We’ve been preparing that beam for more than ten years.”

“It’s difficult to realize that the machine, at last, is starting now,” he added. (See photos of the collider.)

By creating hundreds of thousands of head-on collisions each second, physicists hope to understand the fiery conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after the big bang.

The findings could also help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as the existence of one long-hypothesized particle called the Higgs boson—or the “God particle”—thought to be responsible for giving all other particles their mass.

So says Stephen Hawking:

One option is that there likely isn’t life elsewhere. Or maybe there is intelligent life elsewhere, but when it gets smart enough to send signals into space, it also is smart enough to make destructive nuclear weapons.

Hawking said he prefers the third option:

“Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,” he then quickly added: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

There is no real evidence of life existing elsewhere (save for maybe the controversial ALH84001 Martian meteorite, but given the vastness of the universe and how little of it we have explored, our data is so limited that we can only speculate. It is widely believed that liquid water exists on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus so life would be theoretically possible on either. But until we can do more exploration of space, we can only speculate. Until then, I’m inclined to agree with Hawking: we probably are not alone.

A rare mummified dinosaur has been found in North Dakota:

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It’s among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

“This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh,” said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.

“This is not the usual disjointed sentence or fragment of a word that the fossil records offer up as evidence of past life. This is a full chapter.”

Only four mummified dinosaurs “of any significance” have ever been found, so it’s a pretty big deal. As a kid I was always fascinated by dinosaurs. In those days I wanted to be a paleontologist, but then I realized what long, hot, grueling work excavation is. Still, I’d imagine finding something like this makes it worthwhile.

The headline of this article made be chuckle at first glance, but the article itself makes a lot of sense:

Killer robots could become the weapon of choice for militants, a British expert said on Wednesday.

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield said he believed falling costs would soon make robots a realistic option for extremist groups.

Several countries and companies are developing the technology for robot weapons, with the U.S. Department of Defense leading the way. More than 4,000 robots are deployed in Iraq.

I’m no expert in robotics, but it does make sense to use robots in battle since the could be programmed with superhuman abilities and would keep human casualties at a minimum. Of course, with very advancement in technology we come closer to the day of robot rights, another concept that sounds crazy today but may not in the future.

Brendan Loy has some good photos and information about the lunar eclipse, meteor shower, and the spy satellite that was shot down last night. I actually went to Roane State’s Tamke-Allan Observatory last night to watch the eclipse, but sadly clouds prevented us from a good view.

Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of the Challenger disaster:

On this day in 1986, the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger Crew lost their lives as the spacecraft broke apart on its way into space.

The crew of STS-51-L mission included pilot Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik.

Challenger is one of my very first memories. I was about two months shy of my fifth birthday when it happened and clearly remember the shock and horror of it all. It’s hard to believe so much time as passed.

It was a great tragedy. We should all remember these heroic pioneers who gave their lives in the spirit of exploration.

Cameron Clark has a great post on the relationship between science and faith. I mere quote won’t do it justice, so head over and take a look.

Via Glen Dean

The Mars rover Spirit has captured a strange figure on the Red Planet. Is it an alien? It looks to me like bigfoot. I am skeptical, of course, but I want to believe.

For the first time in 33 years, a spacecraft has visited Mercury, our solar system’s innermost planet. It took some fascinating photos and the data collected should help us better understand the smallest planet–and our own world.

The War on Terror, coming soon to a laptop near you:

NATO is acknowledging YouTube as its new battleground in the six-year war on Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, as the military alliance posts formerly secret surveillance and attack video.

Newly declassified video shows NATO forces destroying a truck in Afghanistan.

The strategy aims to counter years of propaganda video posted on the Internet showing Taliban attacks on NATO forces which fighters use to claim that NATO’s position in the Afghan war is deteriorating.

The article goes on to note that we’ve been losing this cyber war on terror, which is inexplicable and inexcusable given that our enemies are literally hiding in caves.

Google, the top search engine in the world, has celebrated its tenth anniversary. Hard to believe. I remember using Yahoo, Dogpile, and AltaVista back in the pre-Google era. They all still exist, but are only shadows of their former selves.

If this is accurate, our entire of understanding of time and space has been broken:

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.

For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.”

If I had $100 million I would use it for this:

Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, is in negotiations with the customers who will fly the first private expedition to circumnavigate the Moon.

“I hope to have those contracts signed by the end of the year,” said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures’ president and CEO.

I really hope space tourism happens in my lifetime, and I hope it becomes a little more economically feasible. The adventurous geek in me would love nothing better than to go into outer space.

Via Glenn Reynolds

Don Herbert, better known as television’s Mr. Wizard, has passed away:

Don Herbert was television’s indelible Mr. Wizard, who “unlocked the wonders of science for youngsters of the 1950s and ’60s” before taking his show to Nickelodeon in the 1980’s to engage a whole new generation, as The Times’s obituary says. He was the prototype for a whole species of pop-science teachers, from Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman to Steven Spangler, the man credited by Wikipedia as having once held the world record for the tallest Diet Coke geyser.

I was not yet born when “Watch Mr. Wizard” aired in the 1950s and 1960s, but I was a huge fan of “Mr. Wizard’s World,” which aired on Nickelodeon during the 1980s and 1990s, and was one of the primary reasons I became interested in science. I remember attempting many of the experiments I saw on his show.

One of the great things about Don Herbert was his ability to effectively communicate complex scientific laws to kids without taking down to them. Indeed, many scientists today were influenced by “Mr. Wizard.” I don’t think there could be any greater honor for him than this:

During the 1960s and ’70s, about half the applicants to Rockefeller University in New York, where students work toward doctorates in science and medicine, cited Mr. Wizard when asked how they first became interested in science.

A great man has passed. RIP.

Roger L. Simon, discussing Fred Thompson, ponders the new secretless world that we now find ourselves in:

We just live in an era of no secrets. The idea of a private life is over. And running for President - or doing anything public for that matter - makes it worse.

But what’s fascinating in all this is that, for all our information, you rarely learn the real truth about anyone. When you finally or accidentally meet someone about whom you’ve been reading this endless stream of rumors, facts and what-not, you end up encountering something totally different. Again: a human being (with all his/her attendant pluses and minuses - many of them surprisingly lovable.)

It’s a strange Google word we live in.

Indeed. I suspect any candidate viewed as a front runner, be they Tompson, Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Hillary, Edwards, or Obama, will have some skeletons falls from their closets. And these candidates only have the last 15 years or so of their lives available through Google. In 20 years, candidates will have nearly their entire lives available at the click of some operative or journalist’s fingertips. When it comes to mudslinging, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.