Kinda fun "report from the future" about the explosion of internet information and the displacement of the legacy media.

Thanks to The Unpopulist.

Hey! What About That "Big Project"? (Avoiding it at the moment.)

Posted by: Ace at 06:05 PM | Comments (2)
Post contains 50 words, total size 1 kb.

I'll be blogging, but primarily the linking sort, unless inspiration strikes.

I'm working right now on a big project (at least for me, it's a big project) that has to be completed by Thursday night. It won't take up every free hour of the day, but it'll take up a lot of them.

Thanks for understanding. Assuming you do understand.

If you don't understand, then I guess I have to respond with Conan's final line of his prayer to Crom-- "Then to hell with you."

Except with one of those internet smiley-faces after it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:33 AM | Comments (9)
Post contains 101 words, total size 1 kb.

Or at least maybe it needs to be tweaked:

It was in 1980 that John Anderson first wondered if something funny was going on with gravity.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist was looking over data from two Pioneer spacecraft that had been speeding through the solar system for nearly a decade.

Only something was off base. The craft weren't where they were supposed to be.

Rather than traveling at a constant velocity of more than 25,000 mph toward the edge of the solar system, Pioneers 10 and 11 were inexplicably slowing down. Even factoring in the gravitational pull of the sun and its other planets couldn't explain what he was seeing.

How could that be?

At first, Anderson figured there must be a simple explanation. Maybe there was a malfunction on board the spacecraft. Maybe his calculations were wrong.

Shy, bookish and soft-spoken, Anderson was not the type to call a news conference to announce that two U.S. spacecraft appeared to be disobeying the physical laws of the universe.

"I assumed something was going on that I didn't understand," said Anderson, now 70. "So I just kept at it."

For years.

It was a lonely, often comfortless pursuit. Some critics pounded away at him for daring to question the conventional wisdom about the force that keeps our feet on the ground and the stars on their appointed rounds. Others questioned his math.

Two decades later, Anderson's work on what is now called the Pioneer Anomaly may finally be paying off.

In October, a European Space Agency panel recommended a space mission to determine whether Anderson had found something that could rewrite physics textbooks. Some cosmologists even speculate the Pioneer Anomaly might help unravel some of the thorniest problems in theoretical physics, such as the existence of "dark matter" or mysterious extra-dimensional forces predicted by string theory.

...

"There are two possible explanations," Turyshev said. "The most plausible is systematics."

The second possibility is new physics.

"If it's new physics, the implications are truly tremendous," he said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what would be the implications?

One possibility is that invisible, so-called dark matter is holding the spacecraft back. Some cosmologists believe that dark matter exists because only 10% of the expected mass of the universe has been found. If 90% of the universe's mass and energy is invisible, maybe it could exert gravitational pull on spacecraft.

Another possibility, even more fanciful, is that invisible dimensions of space are tugging at the Pioneers. This idea has its origin in string theory, an idea that suggests we are surrounded by far more than the three dimensions we know about. Some versions of string theory suggest there may be as many as 11 dimensions, most of which are curled up and hidden from us.

As with dark matter, no hard evidence has been found proving the existence of vibrating strings far tinier than the smallest known particles.

A third possibility is that gravity has been hiding secrets that three centuries of research have failed to uncover.

NASA doesn't seem interested in a launch to test if the anomaly is real. Seems to be one of the cheaper projects it could fund-- just send a big radio transceiver into space, without all that fooferall needed to land on a planet.

But at least until 2015, there'll be no tests. Shame.

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (22)
Post contains 566 words, total size 4 kb.

... seems to be what the secularist project is ultimately about:

We waged war on teaching and practicing religion in the public schools on the flimsy grounds of separation of church and state and the First Amendment. But there can be no real separation of religion and society. The president, his Cabinet, the Congress and the courts are full of men and women who are members of churches and other religious institutions. Their decisions are influenced in some measure by their religious traditions. The president has made it abundantly clear he feels inspired by his higher power when he makes decisions. Like it or not, a huge number of U.S. citizens say they are members of some religion.

None of them wishes to have an established church like the state churches of England and Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The Founding Fathers went so far as to say there will be no establishment of religion. But nothing prohibits people from expressing their religious beliefs in public, both personally and politically. Yet liberals have said that there must be a separation of religion and society, that anything religious is construed as establishing religion. Thus, liberals in general are seen as anti-religion, and not just for insisting on separation of church and state.

I think that's about right. "Separation of church and state" is a nice slogan, but it what it tends to mean in practice -- given the massive and omnipresent government plays in our lives today -- is the separation of church and public life altogether. I don't see how the Doyennes of Tolerance can fail to understand that it is not "tolerant" to insist that people hide their religion, as if it were some sorty of perversion, whenever they step into the public square.

H/t to Pundit Guy, who praises the author for exhibiting rare liberal candor.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (11)
Post contains 319 words, total size 2 kb.

In case you haven't seen it yet, it's definitely worth watching, and very inspirational.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (2)
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

Football Fans For Truth gets last licks on this preening ponce, taking note of how much fame and fortune he's gotten for his, ahem, "bravery."

I can't figure out what the hell a picture of Keira Knightley's fabulous midriff is doing at the end of the article, but then, I'm at the age where I've learned that sometimes it is better to not argue and simply say "Thank you."

Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (9)
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

The smarties at the New York Times are hopelessly befuddled; our intelligence services are confused and uncertain.

Mary at Exit Zero has a clue for them. One picture is worth a thousand New York Times think-pieces:

.

Click on picture for article; scan down to "Forensically Verifiable."

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (12)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

The American Digest offers what I think is a blog first-- a free downloadable book.

Apparently he wrote (or, I suppose, complied) The Quotable Sherlock Holmes some time ago, and it's now out of print. Out of print, but no longer unavailable. And you really can't argue with the price.

Holmes mentions he's got "ten or twelve" cases he's currently working on, with little enthusiasm. "They are important, you understand, without being interesting."

I think that any blogger/reader who peruses the headlines every day knows that feeling well.

Posted by: Ace at 10:55 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.

I love Drudge, but let's face it, he's willing to be used in order to get an exclusive. How many dumb "exclusives" about Hollywood outrages has he ran? Like, for example, that dumb bit about their being "controversy" over the ending of Planet of the Apes. Does anyone doubt these "controversies" are deliberately fed to Drudge simply to ramp up interest in books and movies?

The latest is this "controversy" over the dopey "Blue Christmas" puppet short, which showed Rush Limbaugh passed out on the bathroom floor, apparently having OD'd on oxycontin. This is typical SNL conservative bashing-- hardly nasty or unprecedented by SNL standards. And yet we're to believe that there was some sort of "backstage outrage" over the joke:

The animated sketch left one senior production source stunned and outraged, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

"Would we have done this to [John] Belushi? [Chris] Farley?" the source said on Sunday from New York.

The source asked not to be identified fearing retribution from SNL's executive producer Lorne Michaels.

Give me a break. I don't believe any of this for one instant. SNL does lots of drug humor, and makes fun of people for abusing alcohol and drugs all the time, and no one has ever before complained that this was somehow off-limits because of Belushi and Farley.

Michelle Malkin also seems to be aiding and abetting in this publicity-seeking hoax.

Just ignore it. The show is virtually unwatchable, and is probably less funny now than it's been since... well, I'm going to have to go back to the 1985-1986 Anthony Michael Hall/Robert Downey Jr./Randy Quaid cast, I think. And contrived conservative controversaries are hardly any reason to pay the show additional attention or give it undeserved ratings.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (45)
Post contains 299 words, total size 2 kb.

Comes from Alarming News, in a good piece about how the media can use bloggers to generate buzz. (Hint: It's pretty simple-- mention us.)

But the quote of the day comes from "someone" at a CATO conference she attended last year:

"Rupert Murdoch discovered a niche market when he started Fox News: half the country."

Indeed and/or heh. Your choice.

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 68 words, total size 1 kb.