Be advised, everyone! AAA is offering free rides and tows to those who have consumed too much alcohol to drive safely. “Tipsy Tow” is offered in select states courtesy of AAA between 6 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 31, 2011 and 6 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 1, 2012 and they will take you up to ten miles. After that, puke on the side of the road until your car starts talking to you.
Be safe and Happy New Year!
we have this same problem in these United States. Actually I am at the point where I would like to see the government get out of the way and allow more commercial spaceflight, especially Solar Power Satellites as a real solution to our energy crisis.
Failed Russian Mars Mission Shows the Dangers of “Lost Generation” in Science and Engineering
I’m going to tell you something mildly controversial, but painfully true. For the first several years of the Space Race, we got our asses handed to us by the Soviets. From Sputnik to Laika to Gagarin, they beat us handily into space. Hell, they beat us to the Moon, Mars, and Venus too (unmanned). But we listened to JFK, pulled up our John Wayne boots by our John Wayne bootstraps, and fought into the lead, where we remained from 1969 until the present day.
And what happened to the Soviet/Russian space program? With the fall of the USSR and the resulting economic chaos, they became a shell of their former greatness. It’s a simple equation. Due to a lack of (or more accurately, an “inability to generate”) funding, and a post-Communist exodus of intellectual capital to the western world, Russia’s space program has become little more than a taxi service to the International Space Station, and that only by default.
Their most recent effort, the Phobos-Grunt Mars probe, failed after launch and is stuck in Earth orbit. If it is not reactivated and completely repaired by December, it will likely burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere - a fiery end to a satellite that was supposed to revitalize Russia’s space dreams.
Russia is a nation where 90% of its engineers are over 60 or under 30 years old. Their electronics industry is at least a decade behind the state of the art. They invest only 3% of global spaceflight funding. They lack sufficient communications and manufacturing infrastructure for their space missions, and rely on “leasing” of Soyuz by the United States to continue launches at all.
If this sounds frightening, that’s because it is. This is what happens when a country fails to invest in a generation of science and engineering education and loses the will to fund innovation. It’s a sad time for Russian science, and also a warning to the rest of us of how quickly it can all fade away. Do we want to give some other nation their “Sputnik moment”, or continue to create more of our own?
Keep fighting for science funding and education in your home country.
(more at Reuters, illustration by Sascha May: “The Sad Cosmonaut” used under CC license)
Not just Halliburton, though. Not even just military-industrial complex corporations. Also politicians. Nothing to drum up public support like a good war! Here’s hoping an invasion of Iran doesn’t happen to serve that purpose in 2012.
Rolling Stone chats with Shawn Otto about his new book: Fool Me Twice - Fighting the Assault on Science in America
Here’s the best part I took away from their talk, and essentially the mission statement for my life:
Most people don’t have time to study the science of things and find out who’s telling the truth and who’s blowing smoke. And antiscience vested interests from megachurch evangelists to oil and gas companies to antivaccine activists are taking advantage of that to try to fool us while our scientists have been busy doing science. It’s our responsibility to not let that happen, not to let them fool us twice, but to be the tough, hard-headed, critically minded, pro-science Americans that kept the world safe for democracy and put a man on the moon. Our own economy, our own environment, our own moral legacy, and the quality of the lives of our own children are depending on no one else but us.
