U.S. Military Has Two Better-Than-Hubble Space Telescopes Just Sitting Around -
U.S. Military Has Two Better-Than-Hubble Space Telescopes Just Sitting Around
NASA’s been wracked by budgetary concerns as it tries to figure out how to do research into the origins of everything *and* loft human beings into orbit with big rockets. In particular, the space agency has been dealing with cost overruns on the next-generation Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, which have been eating up the science budget.
Now, we get word from the Washington Post that the Department of Defense has gifted two better-than-Hubble telescopes to NASA. That’s right. Our military had two, unflown, better-than-Hubble space telescopes just sitting around. This story is almost unbelievable; it feels like a hoax. But it’s not.
Read more. [Image: NASA]
NASA: Can you spare a Hubble?
U.S. military: Sure, have two!
Where is poverty in the national agenda? -
So how can disadvantaged Americans get the sustained attention of their legislators? How can poverty, segregation, and discrimination get the place on the public agenda they deserve to have? The classic answer offered by American politics is simple: mobilize, elect some legislators if your own, and find ways of challenging those legislators who continue to ignore your issues. There’s just one problem with this: there isn’t much history of success in the US for poor people’s movements. I suppose specialists could offer some reasons for why that would be true — poor people don’t vote, poor people are distributed in small numbers over numerous districts, poor people can be misled by political rhetoric too — but it’s hard too think of parties or majorities who have paid serious attention to poor people’s issues. (How much political influence does the homeless guy selling the homeless people’s newspaper on Main Street really have?)
(Source: azspot)
“
The key reason why the recovery is so anemic is so much income and wealth are now concentrated at the top is America’s the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power necessary to boost the economy.
The richest 1 percent of Americans save about half their incomes, while most of the rest of us save between 6 and 10 percent. That shouldn’t be surprising. Being rich means you already have most of what you want and need. That second yacht isn’t nearly as exciting as was the first.
It follows that when, as now, the top 1 percent rakes in more than 20 percent of total income — at least twice the share it had 30 years ago — there’s insufficient demand for all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing at or near full employment. And without demand, the economy doesn’t grow or generate nearly enough jobs.
” — Robert Reich: Obama has to Explain Why Fairness is Essential to Growth (and Why Some Democrats Have to Stop Believing Otherwise)[video]
“
Development economists have long surmised that some very poor people may remain trapped in poverty because even the largest investments they are able to make, whether eating a few more calories or working a bit harder on their minuscule businesses, are too small to make a big difference. So getting out of poverty seems to require a quantum leap—vastly more food, a modern machine, or an employee to mind the shop. As a result, they often forgo even the small incremental investments of which they are capable: a bit more fertiliser, some more schooling or a small amount of saving.
This hopelessness manifests itself in many ways. One is a sort of pathological conservatism, where people forgo even feasible things with potentially large benefits for fear of losing the little they already possess. For example, poor people stay in drought-hit villages when the city is just a bus ride away. An experiment in rural Bangladesh provided men with the bus fare to Dhaka at the beginning of the lean season, the period between planting and the next harvest when there is little to do except sit around. The offer of the bus fare, an amount which most of the men could have saved up to pay for themselves, led to a 22-percentage-point increase in the probability of migration. The money migrants sent back led their families’ consumption to soar. Having experienced the $100 increase in seasonal consumption per head that the $8 bus fare made possible, half of those offered the bus fare migrated again the next year, this time without the inducement.
People sometimes think they are in a poverty trap when they are not. Surveys in many countries show that poor parents often believe that a few years of schooling have almost no benefit; education is valuable only if you finish secondary school. So if they cannot ensure that their children can complete school, they tend to keep them out of the classroom altogether. And if they can pay for only one child to complete school, they often do so by avoiding any education for the children they think are less clever. Yet economists have found that each year of schooling adds a roughly similar amount to a person’s earning power: the more education, the better. Moreover, parents are very likely to misjudge their children’s skills. By putting all their investment in the child who they believe to be the brightest, they ensure that their other children never find out what they are good at. Assumed to have little potential, these children live down to their parents’ expectations.
” — The Economist(Source: economist.com)
“There are some questions in life, the very speaking of which are their own undoing. Am I fired? Is this a date? Are you breaking up with me? Yes. No. Yes.” — David Rakoff in this weekend’s episode of This American Life, The Invisible Made Visible
(Source: nprfreshair)
For some reason, I didn’t need to know the news to get this one…
“Forgetting Buchanan’s sexual orientation helps us forget all the other national secrets we have packed into that closet with him. Ultimately, it prompts us to succumb to chronological ethnocentrism. If, however, we can rid ourselves of the fantasy that we are always getting better, then maybe we can create a nation that actually becomes more tolerant. Then we might — again — elect a real gay president.” — Our real first gay president
(Source: anticapitalist, via wilwheaton)
[video]
It only takes 39 digits of pi to draw a circle the size of the universe down to the accuracy of a hydrogen atom.
“
It’s not a handshake that says everybody loves everybody else. It’s a handshake that says, “Whatever crap’s gone on before now and whatever crap will go on after this game is over, for the next 90 minutes - let’s just play a game of football”.
It’s nothing more symbolic than that, which is why in our view they should continue - period.
” — Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore[video]
This is a beautiful illustration of the process of statistical aggregation. Notice the trade-off between simplicity and loss of information. The art in statistics is to figure out the right balance between the two.
“Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderon, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers “enter fleeing.” The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of nonparticipating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter “fleeing” takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of onlooking strangers.” — From Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street (h/t: Charles Mudede)
![highcountrynews:
The effect of climate change on Washington State could be $10 BILLION per year.
And yet we have this not-nice-word publicly elected official who “question[s] the status quo of the mainstream media concerning climate change (a.k.a. sustainability) and education” and is “working to reveal the truth.” Because everyone agrees “[t]he fruits of your labor should not be plundered to follow a mandate based on false science and taught in our schools as if it were fact.”
That “mandate”? Executive Order 09-05. And it calls for such controversial stuff as to “design a national greenhouse gas emission reduction program that reflects Washington State priorities” and ”develop and adopt regional transportation plans that will, when implemented, provide people with additional transportation alternatives and choices, reduce greenhouse gases and achieve the statutory benchmarks to reduce annual per capita vehicle miles.” DAMN YOU, BIG GOVERNMENT!!!!! <fist shake>](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m20jurUVBi1qjqn01o1_500.jpg)
The effect of climate change on Washington State could be $10 BILLION per year.
And yet we have this not-nice-word publicly elected official who “question[s] the status quo of the mainstream media concerning climate change (a.k.a. sustainability) and education” and is “working to reveal the truth.” Because everyone agrees “[t]he fruits of your labor should not be plundered to follow a mandate based on false science and taught in our schools as if it were fact.”
That “mandate”? Executive Order 09-05. And it calls for such controversial stuff as to “design a national greenhouse gas emission reduction program that reflects Washington State priorities” and ”develop and adopt regional transportation plans that will, when implemented, provide people with additional transportation alternatives and choices, reduce greenhouse gases and achieve the statutory benchmarks to reduce annual per capita vehicle miles.” DAMN YOU, BIG GOVERNMENT!!!!! <fist shake>
(via newshour)