Interesting article on the state of Rick Perry’s faith by Kathleen Townsend at the Atlantic. The Money quote:

Maybe he believes, like some socially conservative evangelicals, that these passages refer only to personal charity, not government programs. But I don’t see any place in the Bible that says we shouldn’t use all the tools we have at hand to help the poor, the sick, and the hungry. The same conservative Christians claim that the Bible teaches them that the government should outlaw gay marriage and stem cell research. But why should the government carry out some Biblical injunctions and not others?

No doubt plenty of convoluted apologetics exist which happen to coincidentally line up exactly with the interests of Perry and his zillionaire buddies. Funny how that always seems to be the case. One might almost call it miraculous.

I wonder if the Christians in the US understand that when the religious right champions torture or exploitation of the middle class, or any of dozens of ugly right-wing political positions they embrace, and makes up transparent excuses for why a loving God really wants us to crush a suspect’s testicles in a vice or doesn’t want We the People to intercede if homeless families are starving in the streets, it’s revolting to most of the rest of us on every level.

Every time I see that stuff I feel lucky to not be a Christian. For years I considered every single one of them either a hopeless dope, or a sleazy conman fleecing the dopes, precisely because of the antics of the religious right and the tele-evangelical phenomena. I’ve since met many great progressive people of faith who have helped dissuade me of that, but the stereotype still lingers and, as long as religious opportunists like Rick Perry thrive, it probably always will.

Most aliens in science-fiction movies are disappointing. Even the aliens in a program I saw last night speculating on an invasion were unimaginative. They went with the usual humanoid with a skin condition and large eyes deal. Real aliens would surely be very different from anything we can imagine. Here’s one example of just how different they could be, drawn up by my talented artistic friend Karen Wehrsten a few years ago.

Qax were dreamed up by hard sci-fi writer Stephen Baxter, and they are weird! Qax biology is based around chemical hyper-cycles embedded in convection cells. A Qax is millions of such cells arranged on the sea surface in a branching pattern covering several miles. Each cell is as wide as a coffee can lid, languidly bubbling like chocolate with nested eddies down to the microscopic level; they’re highly organized, living storms.

Shown right, on a young, simmering ocean world, under an oversized blue-white star, the tendrils of one Qax reach out to the limb of another in the distance. The bluish sunlight is filtered and scattered to a pinkish orange by a dense blanket of CO2 spiked generously with hydrocarbon and sulfur compounds. Undersea volcanoes light up the horizon and belch more toxic gas into the air.

In Baxter’s Xeelee series, the Qax at one time enslaved mankind. Humans eventually threw them off thanks to the efforts of mostly one guy, but the Qax never forgot us. They spent the next 5 million years learning to live in other turbulent systems, gas giants, stars, even the quantum turbulence of empty space. All the time they had one species goal, revenge.

That last part definitely sounds human. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I’ll have another alien taken from another writer’s dreams that is even more alien, in some respects, than the Qax!

That scene on the movie Office Space was brilliant. The only way it could have been better wuold be if it were a computer, especiaily some of the ones I’ve owned. Ever wondere why computers suck so much, why they’re so confusing, which is a nice way to say they’re so aggravating they could drive one to violent felonies against innocent silicon wafers? Finally, after I’ve spent the last year in retail tech support, the secret can be revealed.

The number one reason computers suck is because of thieves. Crooks who steal everything they can get their virtual mitts on, often operating freely in countries where corrupt or indifferent law enforcement agencies happily look the other way.  These assholes cause all sorts of problems for PC users. A common one is the antiviral software dilemma, too strong or too weak — the digital equavilent of autoimmune conditions vs compromised immunity seen in Lupus vs HIV or cancer patients, where confusing packages of security software must be bought and maintained which either slow every damn thing down when it’s not outright shutting them off, or let malacious programs through slowing or shutting every damn thing down.

The second reason computers suck is because We the Users buy them based on cost but use them based on need. It’s kind of like a farmer buying a vehicle based purely on cost and then hooking it up to a plow. That Kia Soul will pull a combine alright, better than a person doing it with sheer muscle power anyway. But it’s going to get expensive real quick, because it won’t do it well and it won’t last long doing it. 

That being said, the PC and software industry could, imo, do a better job. Just one example: the hung web page. We have dual memory cores and graphics cards and blazing fast Internet speeds. And yet windows developers are unable to put out a browser and operating system that will reliably and quickly shut down a webpage that hangs up. You know the drill, the page you’ve been visiting all day and/or all year suddenly won’t finish loading. There’s no indication of when to give up, you just have to guess. Finally, in frustration, you click on the X to shut the sucker down, and then nothing happens or, worse, an annoying message that ‘the page is no responding’ appears. At which point you start task manager, and half the time task manager also informs you the program is not responding to being shut down. In extreme cases the power has to be cut and the device rebooted, all because one web page wouldn’t load.

One would think that ending a connection would be a fairly simple operation. When that X is clicked, that page should close, ideally without resorting to a special program plastering up an annoying messages that the page is not responding on programs when it was specifically opened to end an unresponsive page. And yet this must be more difficult than it sounds because, despite 20 years of web innovation to the tune of trillions of dollars and enough graduate degrees to paper over a small state, it has so far eluded the nerdiacs.

Computers are, hands down, the most confusing, unreliable, over hyped items most people have to deal with in life. And that’s the kicker, that’s why people get so pissed off at computers and software: we have to deal with them. One can no more function in 21st America without a PC than they can without being able to read and write. And what’s even more aggravating is, far from getting a handle on it, meaning operating systems and applications that don’t routinely seize up or crash, that same technology is instead being extended to everything from television sets to cell phones. A few more years of this and I won’t be able to brew coffee without downloading F-secure and Defender and fighting off whatever slips through. Maybe we should just hope future household appliances rely on Apple and not PC based code.

OK, all this whining is just a way for me to vent. What’s a blog for after all? Truth be told, my ASUS came down with fake security virus. And that’s what really sparked this post, or the first part about thieves anyway. /Rant

Update 8 AM CDT: Wow , lots of responses. OK, in rough order, I use every web browser, FF, Chrome, I/E when I have to, etc. My firewall at work is whatever they say, at home it’s the standard Windows Vista or the ASUS XP thing. I’ve opened and closed ports as needed, changed proxy settings, one of my machines is currently in perm safe mode w/networking because i just got tired of it being so slow. Incidentally, found a rootkit virus or at least a piece of an old one when reading the msinfo in that one, got rid of that and it wasn’t easy.

Thing is though, I know this stuff “OK,” or at least I have very good resources to go to for advice when I run into something I can’t resolve on my own. Most people don’t have a lot of experience reading an msinfo or a handy dandy tech assistant guide that parses it down, few people can do a trace route without specific intrusctions and fewer still know how to read it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been dragged over to a friend’s house on a weekend morning to try and fix their damn PC. For free of course.

In response to the point about Windows or Macs, these devices I have and wrote about will probably be the last Windows machine I ever own. My next PC will be a Mac. That’s not to say Macs are immune to problems, we get some Mac tickets at work. But I’ve been around both kinds now, inside and outside, that I think a Mac is worth a shot even though it’s going to cost twice as much.

 

Suborbital flight will open up access to space for us regular folks, we children of Apollo (Or in the former USSR, children of Soyuz) who’ve gazed skyward with a heaping helping of awe tinged with a touch of envy for half a century and counting. In 50 years of exploration only about 500 human beings have been lucky enough to go into space. Most of them are government or civilian pilots, a few scientists, engineers, and medical doctors, and a handful of privately funded astronauts lumped – unfairly as we’ll see in future posts — into the category of space tourists. In the next decade or two more than ten times that many will get to go. Among them will be the first rock and roll star, the first paraplegic (Who may find the freedom afforded by weightlessness to be so enjoyable they may not want to come back!), and the first head of state. They’ll be followed, sooner or later, by the first teenager, the first President, even the first infant.

Adventure is reason enough! But there’s science to do up there too. Our atmosphere is actually thousands of miles thick, but it’s not a continuous, gradually thinning blanket of cooler and cooler air as one might think. It’s a thing of layers, like an onion, each marked by abrupt changes in temperature and other properties. The part we’re most familiar with, the part containing every forest, coastline, and hanging valley, is the Troposphere. It starts at the surface, what scientists call the planetary boundary layer, and extends all the way past the thin wispy cirrus clouds that fly above the tallest thunderstorms. Only the highest flying birds and the peaks of the world’s greatest mountains soar into the next layer, the Stratosphere. The stratosphere is a layer of stable air that acts like a lid on weather systems embedded in the troposphere, limiting the vertical development of thunderstorms and blizzards. This is the realm the protective ozone that shields the planet’s surface from harsh ultraviolet light like a global sunscreen.

The highest flying rocket planes like the legendary X-15 and the proposed Lynx, shown right, penetrate the layer after that, the Mesosphere, where the air is many times thinner than on Mars. It is the coldest part of our fragile atmosphere, around 135 degrees below zero on average, the stage where grand electrical discharges called sprites and jets are conducted, and shooting stars end their brief dazzling lives. Beyond that are the Thermosphere and Exosphere, both so rarefied and distant that we’ve adopted another, simpler word to describe their properties: space.

Notice there’s no hard altitudes associated with the descriptions above. That’s because the earth’s atmosphere expands and contracts with heat and cold. The altitude of each layer changes constantly, as a function of temperature, season, and geography, by a 100 percent or more in some cases. Over the equator, the troposphere extends upward for 12 miles, but above the poles it is only 5 miles thick.

Suborbital spacecraft can take direct readings and collect samples that provide the precise mixture of gases and pressure, including the amounts of industrial pollutants like greenhouse gases or ozone destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Scientists collect a lot of similar data from satellites flying much higher and aircraft flying much lower, but samples from the intermediate alititudes are hard to come by. Just as data collected by hurricane hunter aircraft provide specific and at times critical details about storm intensity and storm surge unavailable to weather satellites, data and samples taken from the upper atmosphere give meteorologists and climate scientists a far better, more detailed understanding of what’s going on in real time. The Mesosphere in particular remains one of the least understood layers of the atmosphere, too high for most aircraft to penetrate and too low for a spacecraft to maintain orbit.

Spacecraft engineering is another area that can benefit from suborbital flight. Here on earth we take gravity, engineers are no exception. That office water cooler depends on gravity to feed water through the valve and into a cup. Fuel tanks in every car and on most airplanes rely to some degree on gravity to help prime the pumps and deliver fuel to the engine. But a tank full of water or fuel in microgravity behaves differently. Unless the tanks, valves and pumps are specially designed to operate in zero G, water or other substances like fuel might glob up, slosh around inside the tank, without making reliable contact with inlets. Pumps in particular have a well known tendency to choke and sputter when they’re forced to try and move both liquid and air. And in space, where replacement and repair are hundreds of vertical miles and millions of dollars away, something as simple as a failed pump can mean a lot more than mere inconvenience, it can mean the difference between life and death.

Likewise, experiments designed to operate in zero G benefit from live tests. Research on materials and processes in microgravity have already resulted in breakthroughs in drug production, silicon wafer fabrication, and molecular biology. There may come a time when automated orbiting mini-factories grow flawless microchips of such quality, or produce pharmaceutical isomers of such purity, that our current earthbound efforts are crude by comparison. Just like pumps and valves, testing these experimental packages before spending millions of dollars to send them to space might save a ton of money for manufacturers.

One fascinating spin-off from commercial suborbital flight could change passenger travel in the same way airlines revolutionized transatlantic travel. Suborbital airlines — or perhaps space lines would be more accurate. Today a flight from New York City to Tokyo takes about 14 hours. And that’s for a non stop flight. A suborbital hop between the two cities might take less than an hour. A passenger could travel from Chicago to London for a lunch meeting and be back in time for dinner with the family.

The cost for a quick trip into space, high enough to earn astronuat wings, usually defined as 100 km (65 miles) above sea level, is expected to run between $100,000 to $200,000. Prohibitive to be sure, but near the range of the middle class. And the cost will drop as more tickets are sold. Wanna take a ride? Space Adventures, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR would all love to talk to you.  

 

I remember it like it was yesterday: speeding through the empty north Texas prairie en route to a holiday rendezvous, Dec 25th, 1968 at 2 AM. I was lying above and behind the back seat, my seven-year old body easily stretched out on the old fashioned rear console, staring up through the slanted glass of a Ford sedan at a crystal clear nightscape. The winter stars were poured thick that night, spilling across the sky like powdered sugar. In a moment of pure synchronicity the radio replayed a newly arrived, static filled season’s greeting carried a quarter million miles on the gossamer wings of invisible light:

We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. … In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth …

My wonder aroused, the rest of the family dozing, I listened intently to mankind’s first message from another world, and asked my father about those brilliant stars burning cold in the night. He began to explain to me quietly, patiently, using analogies of distance a child could grasp. Something clawed up from the subconscious, an extraordinary stew of agoraphobia and wonder gripped me. And I fell into the sky.

In a jolt of acceleration it was as though I were flung out of the car and thrown head over heels off into the endless heavens, a mote of consciousness lost in immensity. It was terrifying, turning to exhilarating; then it was glorious. Who knows what cocktail of neurotransmitters was unleashed in my virgin brain that night. But one dose was all it took. I was mainlining cosmic eternity, and like a latent alcoholic feeling that first warm rush of bourbon, after my transcendental ride ended all I could think was I want some more.

The Apollo 8 reading of Genesis from the moon was the most watched and listened to broadcast in the world up to that time. People of every age and background were profoundly moved that night by the same transmission. It would later win an Emmy, the highest award given by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Millions more the world over were affected in the same way in the years before and in the years after by the drama of human spaceflight. In the late 1950s, legions of excited onlookers flocked to dark pastures and barren desert to catch a fleeting glimpse of Sputnik and other early satellites racing among the stars. Russian school children still learn songs praising Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space. Millions of Americans proudly watched John Glenn lift off in a tiny capsule called Friendship 7 and listened in as he circled the world. Millions of ordinary people joined me in spirit in 1968 when Apollo 8 sent us a cosmic season’s greetings from the back side of the moon.

It is said that during Apollo 11, a billion people listened to radios or watched TV to share in the culmination of one of mankind’s greatest dreams. For a brief moment, the political turmoil and bitter debate dividing Americans from one another and the chilling prospect of cold war melted away, leaving us united not just as a nation, but as a world and a species. Even the failures generated intense interest: the world watched, holding its breath, as NASA battled to bring a severely wounded Apollo 13 and crew back to earth safely.

The effect on those of old enough to remember the triumphs of Apollo were profound. To this day many in my generation think of ourselves as space-race kids. The Children of Apollo. There are a lot of us. The interest in natural science spurred in children by the space-race is matched only by their fascination for dinosaurs. Our celestial inheritance included the belief that with hard work and brainpower, we could do anything. It wasn’t a cliché for us, repeated by teachers and parents hoping to see their children excel. It was innate, imprinted for life.

As impressive as all that is, many following the space program as youngsters in the 60s and 70s confidently assumed vacations on rotating space stations by the year 2000, a base on the moon, and great ships plying the interplanetary space lanes between earth and Mars. Wonder junkies and space race kids even have a cynical catch phrase for our disillusionment: dude, where’s my flying car? And yet so far, only a few hundred of earth’s billions have gone to space. Only 24 lucky people have ventured beyond low earth orbit and no one has crossed that boundary or visited the moon since 1972.

That’s all about to change in the decades ahead. There is a new wind blowing, part technological, part ideology. It is driven by Silicon Valley pioneers who have amassed great fortunes, fueled in part by the innovative spin offs of NASA come full circle, and the great wonder inspired by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong’s one small step. These men and women are not content to wait on short-sight politicians fighting over the bones of NASA. They are not just obsessed with building the rockets and spacecraft that will guide us through our next small step. Readers of this blog will soon meet some of the visionaries determined to actually make that leap.

The effort to expand into the solar system until it becomes economically and culturally irreversible is known simply as Newspace.

A fitting obscure video for an old school Central Texas politician, Project Terror was the intro for an old horror movie program run out of San Antonio in the early 1970s. It was camp, black and white mostly, rubber masked monsters and terrible special effects. That clip takes me back four decades, and for some bizarre reason reminds me of Texas Governor and soon to be Presidential candidate Rick Perry:

Conservatives who make up the core of the GOP primary base view Romney skeptically on cultural issues, and he hasn’t been able to establish himself as the heavy favorite for the nomination even though he’s spent months promoting his background as a businessman and claiming that he alone has the know-how to create jobs to pull the country out of a period of high unemployment, rampant foreclosures and tumultuous financial markets.

This is good news for two reasons. One, Perry is no slouch, don’t under estimate him, he could win. But Romney has a better chance of picking off Obama in the general. Two, Perry will be an endless source of hilarity. This is a guy who worked for Al Gore at one time, flipped to conservative when the political winds changed, and recently expressed his profound, patriotic love for America by threatening to secede and start a second Civil War. It will be a hoot!

 
Update 8 AM EDT: Tropical Storm Franklin is born. At this time the system is forecast to pose no threat to land.

Update 5 PM CDT: The NHC now classifies the system shown in the upper left as tropical depression 6. With winds of 35 mph is is only 4 mph away from the 39 mph threshold required to earn the name Tropical Storm Franklin.

Update 3 PM CDT: The National Hurricane Center has upgraded the disturbance at the upper left to a 60% chance of tropical cyclone formation over the next 24 hours. The next two Atlantic storm names in the 2011 list are Franklin and Gert.

Hurricane season officially began weeks ago, but Mother Nature is now delivering. The image above from the National Weather Service shows no less than four disturbance with the indicted possibility of developing into tropical cyclones. The bottom right two represent classic Cape Verde storm systems capable of producing major hurricanes which could threaten the US and the Caribbean.

I worry most about my friends in and around DC. It’s a huge population center and the last time an organized storm clocked the region was Hurricane Isabel. The storm reached category 5 at one point, but weakened and struck the coast of North Carolina as a category 2 on Sep 18. Even so Isabel was the costliest and deadliest storm of the 2003 season. After the record breaking monsters of the 2004 and 2005 seasons, and the catastrophe of Katrina, residents elsewhere may have become complacent about less powerful storms. This is a mistake.

I sat through half a dozen moderate hurricanes a few years ago in Florida including Jeanne, Francis, and Wilma. The latter at one point was the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin, although it weakened considerably before crossing the Florida peninsula and hitting my town. Cat 2 storms are nothing to take lightly. It’s loud! The wind screams and growls, your house will sound like it’s sitting on a driving range, staccato rapid fire as debris smacks in, punctuated by regular bangs shaking the place like a cannon shot as larger chunks crash in. The walls and ceiling breathe, there is no power, no Internet, no phone, no water. Windows are boarded up; you sit in sweltering, humid darkness listening to pieces of house peel off with absolutely nothing to do but contemplate the state of your homeowner’s insurance.

Update from Mr Upright in comments:

I sat through Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma as well (in Jupter, FL). That year I promised my wife I’d start looking for jobs elsewhere. It’s not that we couldn’t handle the storms. We had impressive damage, but fared better than many. It’s because those were *moderate* storms. I didn’t want to be around for an Andrew.

The aftermath is even worse, days without basic utilities, eating out of cans, roads tricky or impassable, forget about showers, you can’t flush the toilet without a bucket of water (So, fill up your bathtub). I remember at one point surveying my backyard after Francis and noticing a frayed powerline drooping off a leaning pole and snaking through the battered yard. It looped right into a giant puddle … which I then noticed with alarm was the same one I happened to be standing in, both barefeet planted solidly in mud. If that line had been live I probably wouldn’t be.

Point being, even a so-called minor storm is potentially dangerous and guaranteed miserable. Should a hurricane take a bead on you this year, it’s best to get the hell out-of-town. If you don’t have someplace inland to go for a few days, make sure you have a good week’s worth of food and water, batteries for the lights, and whatever medicine you might need. And, if it’s a category 3 or higher, don’t kid yourself, these things can kill you a bunch of different ways. Either leave or head for the local storm shelter.

Like millions of people I’ve paid plenty into Social Security and Medicare. A back of the envelope calculation gives a figure of well over $100,000 into Social Security and tens of thousands into Medicare. I’ve been paying in since 1976 right up until today; insurance actuaries could figure out the present value of that investment to the penny. Best I can do is a rough estimate of the present value — the lump sum of money required now to secure those benefits in the future if I used a commercial insurance company — and that works out to around a quarter of a million dollars.

You know, if someone really wanted to compromise that, the best way to do it would be to offer a cash buyout, maybe 50 cents on the dollar. Plenty of cash strapped Americans would have no choice but to take it. But for some bizzare reason certain politicians and pundits seem to think we’re raring to hand it over for absolutely nothing in return.

Point being, that’s a nice chunk of change! And I’m counting on it, because at the half century mark I’m way too old to start over again. But I rarely if ever hear anyone mention the cold hard cash value that millions of folks like myself have committed to these programs. Worse, no one ever points out that the only way reducing benefits helps the budget deficit — short of eliminating the programs when they stop running a surplus — would be if we cut expenses but keep charging employees and/or employers full boat. I’d like to see the poor sonofbitch who runs on that idea.

When I brought this up to a Teaparty friend the other day, who like all the others oddly swears they were the one in a thousand who objected to Bush’s profligate deficit expansion, her response was, “That’s what you get for trusting the government”. But it’s not the government who’s trying to screw me out of my bought and paid for annuity and irreplacable healthcare, it’s almost entirely conservatives exemplified by the very same fucking Teaparty. And yeah, duh, I don’t trust them and that’s saying it nicely. Whenever wingnuts prattle on about the horrors of raising taxes on zillionaires to repair the trillions in damage done by Republicans, I’m always reminded of that great episode of South Park where the boys download music from the Internet and a Dickensian figure takes them on a tour of what horror ensues for wealthy musicians: “Not a Big Deal?” That would work fine if adjusted for Social Security and Medicare: ‘If employees insist on getting the benefits they paid for fair and square, David Koch might be forced to use a personal jet with no remote for the surround sound system!’

Bottom line, my vote is a pretty simple calculation: I’ll vote for whomever preserves my benefits the best (At present it happens to coinincide with the political ideology that most values science and reality which is sweet icing on the cake). If someone wants to steal my money to pay for dumbass wars and tax cuts that didn’t work, I’ll vote against them in a heartbeat. And if the choice is between the lesser of two evils, that’s an easy call for me. It ought to be an easy call for anyone.

The Texas Observer has several rather creepy articles out on soon-to-be Presidential contender and current Gov Rick Perry. One is called A Wingnut & A Prayer:

On July 17, Apostle Tom Schlueter, the leader of the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, told his Arlington congregation that: “He’s [Satan is] going to go after us who are the army okay? Matter of fact that was interesting because the article that was written, it said Gov. Perry and his army of God and I thought, ‘That’s interesting, they got that right.”

I’ve heard of The Family, I’ve heard of the Moonies, but I’ve never heard of the New Apostolic third-awakening Movement prophets deal. Rachel Maddow had a great segment on this last night — it gets quite surreal about 3 minutes in — introducing the latest creepy right-wing nut jobs posing as religious authorities coming soon to a ballot box near you. The scary thing? I think they really believe this shit:

I got this image from Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog. Doesn’t that look like the Deathstar floating over a soon-to-be-obliterated world?

It’s actually the largest satellite of lovely ringed Saturn, called Titan, with the much smaller moon Tethys floating high in the foreground.