Back in the USSR
The Boys are back in town... Somewhere in Kazakhstan called Kostanai. Astronauts Michael Foale, Cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri and ESA Space person Andre Kuipers landed safely in Kazakhstan. Despite leaks to the helium system, the Soyuz capsule made it through the atmosphere, did not deviate from course and landed as scheduled. Which must mean the Russians are doing their bit right.

Blasting away the cobwebs
On a more important note, Yankee Captain Derek Jeter busted out of his 0-for-32 (gasp!) slump with a solo homer in the bottom of the 1st against Oakland A's' Barry Zito. I feel some sort of relief. The rest of the day he has gone 0-for-3, but we're not really counting again are we?

- Art Neuro

A kick in the teeth by any other name is a kick in the teeth
The United States of America in its usual high-handed manner has snubbed Chinese advances for cooperation in space. That's gotta hurt their ego, especially when the reason they give is because "you're tech isn't mature enough, and we don't want to help you in anyway to get better because there's not anything like parity in level". Okay, admittedly, the capsule by which the Chinese sent their man into space strongly resembled a battered brass kettle, but then the Mercury capsule that sent the guys with the Right Stuff into orbit looked like a tin can too.

Despite this investment, and China's cautious approach to the launching of its manned missions, the U.S. remained unmoved. Questions over whether China's space effort is a civilian program, or a military endeavor that could eventually threaten the U.S., were reportedly responsible for the U.S.A's uncooperative reaction.

"China is at least two decades behind the U.S. in military technology and ability, Johnson-Freese said. But it is possible to develop military space technology through a manned program, there were discussions over whether China's piloted Shenzhou spacecraft could serve as a reconnaissance platform, she added.

So the US argument is, "you guys know just enough to be dangerous. Why make you more dangerous?" When in fact you know this is going to make them dangerous because it's essentially a case of "we're saying no because you are China, a country we don't trust on account of all you Chinese people being in charge of it". Yeah, okay. It might come back to bite them, but by then it might be a whole new kind of world. Who knows?

The take-home message here is that a whole-world approach to space is a long, long, long way away, and that we shouldn't be kidding ourselves with the already rickety ISS.

- Art Neuro

Still doing
My job was supposed to end yesterday, but for reasons known only to gremlins in the machine, (the On-Line editing computer to be precise) I'm still hanging at my place of work. Bit of a joke in that the last 3 weeks have been spent clocking up hours waiting for this machine to get fixed and lo, it's still f*cked. So I'm probably going to put in another fortnight andf then will I join the true ranks of the unemployed. The weird thing is I don't know how I feel about any of this. I keep applying for jobs and never hear back, i keep ringing people for freelance work, but never hear back. It's all a bit scary.
Then, there's a voice in my head that says, "It's not as if you live in (fill in your favourite war-torn-third-world nation here)".
Ya.

- Art Neuro

When you're smiling..
The world smiles along with you, or so go the song lyrics. It seems when you're NASA mourning, the world rips your images to their own political purpose. Genuine mistake or not? Crappy journalism or not? We await the conservative weasel's usual diatribe, but methinks this is just crappy journalism in the era of minimal fact check, maximal spin doctoring.

When you're struggling
The world still smiles at you, if you're the Yankees. What gets me is that in the current offensive funk, even the (alleged, and so-called) 'fans' at Yankee Stadium have started to dance on the heads of their guys. Man, booing Jeter is plain ungrateful and dumb. This is Derek Jeter you are booing, people. The NYTimes has put in a little voice on Jeter's behalf. I guess people feel that at 80 USbucks a ticket, the Yankees ought to win every game; that combined with a league-leading 190million dollar payroll, if they lose, it's fair game to boo. It's one thing for the Red Sox fans to boo Jeter (you expect that), but the fairweather-bandwagon fans who have turned on their man makes one sick. How short is their memory?
End baseball-related rant of the day.

- Art Neuro

No worries mate, aboard the ISS
Well, we heard the noises, we know the gyro needs replacing with a space walk but, according to the outgoing British commander, Michael Foale the ISS is fine:

"I don't believe there's any crisis," said British-born NASA (news - web sites) astronaut Michael Foale, who is in the middle of turning over the station to the incoming commander, Gennady Padalka of Russia.

"I think the rate at which failures are occurring on board, or as we have had recently, on the outside of the station, are at the expected rate, and the crew on board can deal with it," Foale said.

Well, we'll see.
Had 2 weddings to attend today. Hectic to say the least. :)

- Art Neuro

Blast from the past
Remember when the Soviets used to launch things into the high pressure, high temperature cloud that is known as the atmosphere of Venus in the 1970s? Now they are trying to sharpen the images sent back from those probes.

"Most of the images one saw were derived from film recordings or scans of poor quality printed pictures," Mitchell told SPACE.com. "There are several things I believe can be accomplished by yet another go at the data," he said.

His work has paid off.

Using a variety of techniques, Mitchell has reconstructed much more flawless versions of the old Soviet Venus imagery. Furthermore, the optical aficionado is trying to recover accurate color of the Venusian terrain by studying the spectral response of Venera camera filters. Even the skylight spectrum that the Venera landers measured using onboard instruments is being taken into account.

"From their 1980s publications, you can see that the Russians understood the problem," Mitchell said. "But in the early 1980s they may have lacked the computer resources. Chartless camera calibration algorithms had not been invented at that time."

I guess it's a bit like re-mixing songs from the 70s using computer technology, except we're doing space images now. If nothing else, this has got to be exciting for the sake of getting another look at a planet we haven't had much luck with viewing.

Space Walk Time
Here it goes. Time for a space walk on the ISS.

Any spacewalk to fix the gyroscope circuit breaker would be only the second time both station crew members would be outside the space station, leaving no one inside. The first such walk was in February.

The station originally had four gyroscopes, but one of them failed two years ago. It was to have been repaired last year, but the shuttle Columbia accident grounded the three remaining shuttles and postponed that repair.

Guys in spacesuits slowly creeping across the surface of the ISS, looking for a piece of instrument that needs replacing. One of them looks up and in the moment is entranced by the mind-boggling size and depth of the void that is space... Okay, that's the screenwriter in me typing that happily, but it's a little scary no?

- Art Neuro

Rocket Ranger
One of my favourite gaming experiences all time was 'Rocket Ranger' on the Commodore Amiga format. I don't know what it was, the hokey story line, the cool music, the cinematic combat sequences, the idea of running and taking off into the sky to save the world from Nazis who were backed by bikini-clad evil amazon women of the moon... These things never quite leave you. As it is my sister has an Amiga emulator for her PC and occasionally runs this game for her own amusement.
So I am happy to report that the notion of a rocketpack-harnessing person lives on today.
It won't get us to space, It won't even get us to work, but boy is it somehow romantic to rocketpack around the place!

- Art Neuro

It's because they starve to death
In this report we find poets die younger than other writers.

"On average, poets lived 62 years, playwrights 63 years, novelists 66 years and nonfiction writers lived 68 years," Kaufman said in an interview conducted by e-mail.

Kaufman has also studied poets and mental illness.

"What I found was pretty consistent with the death finding actually, female poets were much more likely to suffer from mental illness (e.g., be hospitalized, commit suicide, attempt suicide) than any other kind of writer and more likely than other eminent women," he said.

"I've dubbed this the 'Sylvia Plath Effect."'

Sylvia Plath was a poet and novelist who killed herself in 1963 at the age of 30.

There could also be a more benign explanation for poets' early demise, Kaufman said. "Poets produce twice as much of their lifetime output in their twenties as novelists do," he said.

So when a budding novelist dies young, few people may notice.

Well that's it. I'm never writing a friggin' poem again. Not that I ever wanted to be a poet. I want to be a mentally stable non-fiction writer and live forever. :)

- Art Neuro

In the Space headlines today
Soyuz docked with the ISS. This part is interesting gossip:

Since Columbia disintegrated while returning to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003, the U.S. manned space program has been on hold, leaving Russia's non-reusable Soyuz capsules as the only means for getting crew to and from the station. Russia's unmanned Progress spaceships also ferry supplies to the ISS.

Russia wants to extend the crews' missions from six months to a year; that way, it could sell more seats on the two Soyuz spacecraft it has funding to build each year to high-paying "space tourists."

Of course NASA says no.

Also, in this scientific day and age...
I noticed this event. Now that ought to do it, especially on Adolf Hitler's 109th Birthday!

- Art Neuro

Smoke Over Iraq

Well, the situation in Iraq just keeps getting more interesting. Last week I seriously thought it was the beginning of the end for the US in Iraq. If they crush the recent insurrection, an even bigger one will occur in a couple of months, and the cycle will continue until the whole country is at war. That hasn't happened yet. Maybe the US has decided to go for a political solution, maybe they aren't yet ready to move to crush the insurrection yet, we don't really know. Apparently the US bases in the north are facing serious disruptions to their supply lines:

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=123&art_id=qw1082378340532B262&set_id=1

The US certainly has the capability to crush the revolt. The rebels have no answer to the US firepower, and if the US decides to use it, the revolt will be crushed (significant US casualties will ensue, but they will win in the end). Following this course introduces the risk of actually increasing the intensity of the war by alienating the Iraqi people.

Possibly the most important factor is that the more Iraqis they kill, the weaker the Iraqi governing council becomes, and they have worked hard over the past year to build the council up, especially the security forces. Without the governing council, there will be no reconstruction, no elections, no reduction in US troop numbers, and in short, a complete failure of US policy in Iraq.

The Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq seem to be uniting against their perceived common enemy of the US, which is exactly what the US doesn't want to happen. There are two wild cards in Iraq, the Shiites and the Kurds. Neither have committed themselves to opposing or supporting the American occupation. If either of those groups pick a side, it will make a big difference in the progress of the war. Sadr's uprising has gone some way towards getting the Shiites opposed to the US. If the Americans invade Najaf (which is one of the most sacred sites in the world for Shiite Moslems), there is a good chance that Sadr's work will be complete.

I'll leave you with another article about the apparently impending draft:

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040420154719.soi8dhtt.html

Cognitive Dissonance

All this talk about hostages reminded me of something I read a while back...

'Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." '

This is from July last year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A54345-2003Jul27¬Found=true

Sorry folks
I have been a little distracted lately. It happens when your life turns upside down and you start scrambling to save the deckchairs on your own private Titanic disaster. In between that, and the MLB season rolling along and the renewed conflict in Iraq and the film I'm in pre-production for; a bout of the strange 'flu that gave me joint aches; and preparing a script for a competition; it tends to distract me from the more cosmic issues such as Space.

The other thing that's stopped me from doing much writing here is that the news has been coming in slow, and most of it has been 'more of the same'. In that sense, the important comments to be made have been made about space exploration. It still frustrates me that Australia has NO space policy to speak of beyond licensing of communication satellites, it's not a situation that is going to get rectified in a hurry.

The joys of modern media
The Iraq conflict with its hostage taking has been interesting. Today, Japanese papers are reporting that the three Japanese hostages who were recently released told the Japanese authorities that they were given 'stage directions' for the video; that they ought to look very scared when the knives were flashed and to feign abject fear. This 'admission' has gone down very badly in the Japanese public whose majority sentiment seems to be these people were nothing but trouble-makers for traveling to a war-torn country trying to make a difference for the suffering. What I find amusing is that when ever your turn on a motion-picture camera, it invites into being, THE DIRECTOR. The need for an artifice, demands the entrance of the artificer who promptly sets about stamping his artistic vision on the project in order to best communicate the point. In this instance, the direction was simple and succinct: "Act scared when the guys behind you put a knife to your neck". I admire this, in as much as most directors probably can't come at direction this simplistic, but that's just my 'professional' take on this. The camera angle and the move sucked, the sound was abominable, the acting tough with the masked riflemen schtick was old.... All in all it was a pretty crappy piece of video making, but hey, it made social impact. What more can you expect from an 'act of art'?

More smoke in the shape of white balls with red seams and wooden phallic symbols.
The Yankees have opened the season in a mediocre manner, splitting a 4 game series with Tampa Bay and going down to the Red Sox 1-3 in their first of 19 season stoushes. The pitching is a worry, the hitting is in a team-wide slump, the defense is suspect, but this team is still projected to win over 100games this season. Judging from the early performance, it seems to me very optimistic.

- Art Neuro

Issues of Command

We talked a lot about issues of leadership and command when we were playing WEB. The following article discusses the issues that a Marine commander faced in Iraq, and the consequences of his decisions:

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=440&rnd=167.4177955701791

James

Atlas Rockets still work
As we can see in this article. So it's not as if NASA is devoid of lift vehicles without the Shuttle.

Einstein Experiment Update
Here it is.
And this thing is flying up on a Delta 2 too.

"This test of relativity is very simple in concept, but when you get down to the technology of how to do it, it's a testimony to perseverance to say the least," said Stanford professor Brad Parkinson, who heads the engineering team.

As it turns out, the effect is dramatic around something as massive as a black hole, but rather minimal when measuring the space around something Earth-sized. So the measuring instruments had to be extremely precise, said Parkinson.

To an astronaut orbiting the Earth, the effect is undetectable, but Einstein's theory says that a small bit of space is actually lost as space is spun around on itself.

"You would find if you could measure the radius and the circumference (of that orbit) there would be a small defect which I like to call the missing inch," said Francis Everitt, a theoretical physicist from Stanford, the principal investigator on the NASA project.

- Art Neuro

The Russians
In the absence of the shuttle, there is still the old trusty Russian space program to count upon as they prepare to send a mission to the ISS. It worries me somewhat that their launches take place in Kazakhstan, which is a potential cauldron of terror activity, much like its neighbour Uzbekistan. Oh well, what can you do?

With the U.S. space fleet sidelined, Russia's non-reusable rockets are the only means of delivering astronauts and cargo to the space station.

But burdened with the task of getting astronauts to and from the space station, the cash-strapped Russian space agency has had to put on hold construction of its own segment of the international space station and some commercial projects.

And with the Soyuz only capable of carrying limited cargo loads and three astronauts at a time, the assembly of the space station has slowed considerably.

It seems pay-load is the big issue. If NASA ends up grounding it s shuttle fleet, then it's time to go back to something like the saturns. The irony is that maybe they should have been pursuing that course all these years. Meanwhile, like an injury prone superstar player, the shuttle struggles on its comeback trail.

- Art Neuro

Talk about sticking to a bad game plan
As most of our readers know, we're pretty critical of the Space Shuttle program for its inherent Byzantine machinery, some dating back to 1974, and the over-design that has gone into something that is insufficient to the task of repeated takeoffs and landings.
Today we find this headline that says the Shuttles may never fly again.

"Not flying the Shuttle again would be an even harder decision to make than not flying it to Hubble," said John Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. He was also a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB).

"It is hard to think of how the International Space Station could be effectively used without the shuttle's capability to complete its assembly to a point where all partners agree it is adequate to their minimal aspirations," Logsdon said. "We may depend on other systems for operating ISS sooner than now planned, but losing the contributions that the shuttle can make would be close to tragic."

On the other hand, they are stating the CAIB did not recommend the grounding of the shuttles permanently, so clearly NASA are having to stick with their shuttle program, like it or not; and one suspects they are going to not like it a lot more as scrutiny mounts and the fleet ages.
While the progress of assembling the ISS seemingly locked to the capability of the Space Shuttle, in reality NASA can go back ordering Saturn rockets to launch things into lower orbit where the ISS is stationed. The Shuttle is still over designed, and over-invested for its envisaged task, while carrying pretty colossal risks.

- Art Neuro

The AIDS issue
AIDS is out of control in India they say. It's also a significant problem in Africa and played a part in the recent elections; is a problem in Haiti, Guyana and other countries in the Caribbean.

The upshot of it is that it's going to kill a lot of people in the devolving economies of this world. AIDS medication is a battleground between US pharmaceutical companies that wish to recoup their expensive R&D and make a profit versus the morality of saving lives. A lot of people are caught in the crossfire, waiting. This is a disaster that is going to consume a lot more of the human population than people are giving it credit. I strongly feel that everybody in the more developed world is looking at this as a fire on the opposite bank of the river; perhaps we are seeing this as a form of passive 'culling' of 'excess human population'? One wonders at the callousness of the 'First World' with their copyright laws and patent laws denying many people medication. However the repercussions of AIDS, in the coming years will be economic and severe.

What, we have to qualify it as 'adult porn' now?
While we're on the subject of AIDS and all that, and okay it's smoke, but it's also oddly amusing and I can't avert my gaze, and all that. An HIV scare has hit the adult porn industry (as opposed to the child porn industry, I guess) and everybody is running for the covers.

The Los Angeles-based industry, which normally films three to four films a day, must now wait 60 days to learn whether the deadly virus spread to 14 actresses who had onscreen sex with James, or to the 35 sex partners the women subsequently had.

The at-risk actors have been quarantined until June 8, and Mitchell has advocated a moratorium on shooting until the extent of the infection is known.

Former porn actress Jill Kelly, founder of Jill Kelly Productions Holding, Inc., said she and most other film producers have halted production for the next two months.

In my humble opinion, porn is a dish best served fresh, for there is nothing more sad than old porn (unless of course you're into that vintage black and white thing). So this, must be a big disaster for *everybody*. :)

- Art Neuro

Accountability Police
Unlike some of our favourite fictional universes, NASA is looking to change its culture through asking for more accountability from its managers. It's hard to figure out how this stacks up against the recent report that the very middle-managers they want to change don't want to voice their dissent in the way the place is run. One would think that logically they are on a collision course. My take on this is that NASA wants to be able to hold culpable specific people for certain fuck-ups. Conversely, some people don't want the blame pinned on them so they feel they don't want to speak up when something with a heavy whiff of bullshit makes its way through the corridors of NASA. Clearly there's a deeper issue in there that they have not addressed.
So while this notion of accountability they are pushing in the article looks good as a PR piece, I would imagine it is going to exacerbate some of the deeper issues stemming from the bureaucratic nature of NASA.

Then there's this guy...
The oldest person working has called it quits.
As Dave Brew wryly notes, in the future we will have work-for-the-pension-schemes.

- Art Neuro

Remember DNI? Version 1.0 is here.
Yes folks, the cyberpunk universe starts on the concept of the Direct neural Interface with machines, and as far as I can tell, this is what's being discussed in this article.

Cyberkinetics Inc. of Foxboro, Mass., has received Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) approval to begin a clinical trial in which four-square-millimeter chips will be placed beneath the skulls of paralyzed patients.

If successful, the chips could allow patients to command a computer to act — merely by thinking about the instructions they wish to send.

So pretty soon we might be arguing about cyber-enhanced athletes competing in the paralympics beating the 'ordinary'/drug-enhanced meat athletes... William Gibson is probably dancing in his lounge room right now.

The search goes on...
NASA reports that the search forthe mostt dangerous asteroids are nearly complete and they want to move onto the smaller objects. Of some interest is this section here:

If an asteroid was confirmed to be on a catastrophic collision course with Earth, the experts said it would take about 30 years to get ready to do anything about it.

"The Space Shuttle's main engines and the fuel contained in the large external tank could successfully deflect a 1 kilometer object if it were applied about 20 years in advance," of a projected collision, Griffin said.

Using a nuclear bomb might make matters worse because the pieces of the blown-up asteroid would stay in the same orbit and eventually come back together again.

So, it's not quite like Deep Impact/Armageddon, but they've got something cooking for this contingency.
In other news, the two Mars Rovers are getting a software upgrade.

- Art Neuro

Whistleblowing in the USA
Today we bring you this report that claims NASA's workers are afraid to speak up. To whit:

The 145-page report includes an assessment of NASA's culture by a behavioral science company in California, and a three-year plan for change.

"Safety is something to which NASA personnel are strongly committed in concept, but NASA has not yet created a culture that is fully supportive of safety," the report says. "Open communication is not yet the norm, and people do not feel fully comfortable raising safety concerns to management."

And so it goes. Some times I feel like we're just picking on venerable NASA when its chips are seriously down and its stocks are low; and that we're holding today's administrators responsible for policy f*ckups of yesteryear. At the same time, reports like this make one think, it's just another organisation run by human beings. What makes it more sacred? It hasn't delivered on its promise. Anyway, just in case you thought this was a free kick, it's not.
Meanwhile it appears Russia's Space Agency is headlong, going towards Space Tourism, while America is not far behind.

In other news, Barry Bonds has hit no.660, tying his godfather Willie Mays' career homerun mark. Putting this into perspective is Rob Neyer at ESPN.

- Art Neuro

Speaking of cases that will not die...
Just a quick word about why it is not worth going to the moon for Oxygen. I have already shown why Luna is OK as a fully supported scientific/military/training base but not as a colony. However I hear from the galery that there is Oxygen there. Actually even if there were free Oxyegen and rocket fuel lying on the moons surface for free we might not bother!

It takes a delta-V of 4.5km/s to get from LEO to Mars. It also takes a delta-V of 4.5km/s to get from LEO to Luna orbit - & 6km/s to get to the Luna surface, say nothing og taking off again. Thus it would take a ship in LEO more fuel to take on anything @ Luna than it would to blast off for Mars. OK?

Only if the Luna base can deliver the Oxy right to LEO for less than the cost of boosting it from Earth are you in biz. This would be good though as Oxy makes up about 70% of the mass of a fueled up rocket! Given the cost of Luna colony support this is unlikely to work out though.

Ultimately the fuel & Oxy to ship things to Mars might be economically supplied from elswhere of course but probably not Luna... guess where ; )

- David

Ostriches with heads in the sand, the cases that refuse to die
For some reason we keep coming back to the Kennedy assassinations in this blog. It's not intentional. However, the world is still interested in what really happened, and so we have this situation where History Channel has cancelled the airing of a documentary leveling accusations at Lyndon B Johnson as one of the guilty men.
The documentary was based on the book "Blood, Money & Power: How L. B. J. Killed J. F. K." It is amazing to find that the History Channel can't just air this documentary and let the evidence speak for itself. Instead it has organised a charade to help the cover up. People who still want to believe the Lee Harvey Oswald story will continue to do so. Those of us more inclined to find a solution that stands to reason and logic are being denied an argument that deserves a hearing.

Let's be blunt. The criminals who perpetrated the coup are still getting away with it by covering up, obfuscating, diverting interest. It's time people stood up and said no more. Or shall we wait until 2039? And even then the papers might never be released in order to protect the guilty.

- Art Neuro

Methanol Fuel cells
Korean chaebol Samsung has announced it is bring ing a Methanol fuel cell to the market. What is great about this development is that it may make Lithium ion batteries obsolete, in which case we will have fewer environmental problems in disposing of battery chemicals. However, it maybe the case that we're replacing that problem with more carbon emissions.
It remains to be seen how this development works out. Having said that fuel cell automobiles such as the Toyota Prius brings great promise for the future, so this technology comes at a good time, if not a little on the late-side. I guess it's a case of better late than never.

-Art Neuro

The Hubbub surrounding Hubble
IN 2007, NASA will let the Hubble telescope go to the place where useful expensive space equipment go when they are done. In the wake of NASA's decision to let Hubble go, it has spurred on efforts to assemble a World Space Observatory.

The WSO would be a boon to UV astronomers. Because Hubble multitasks across infrared, visible and UV, only about one-third of its time is allocated for UV observations with, Kappelmann said, 10 times more requests for observing time being submitted than are accepted.

Not only would WSO be UV-only, it would be five to 10 times more sensitive than Hubble, Kappelmann said.

"Certainly, a decent UV space telescope, perhaps the WSO, is needed after the Hubble Space Telescope" stops working, said Bengt Edvardsson, an astronomer at Uppsala University in Sweden who had not heard of the project until recently.

So I guess it's a case of win some, lose some.

Surgery is a game
Apparently, in a totally predictable turn of events, surgeons who play video games err less in their surgery. That's right. The PS2 and Xbox sessions aid the surgeon in their small motor athleticism. "But what about all the blood and the violence?" you may ask. The last time I recalled surgery was pretty violent bloody business, so maybe it helps in their continued inured-ness and inertness about bloody things that make the rest of us squeamish.

Also...
I was shown this very funny site about injuries. Maybe it's not a good idea for Jason Szuminski to be playing ball when he could be training to be an astronaut.

- Art Neuro

The future with RFID
Check this out. Really.

The State of Play Apropos 'Moneyball'
Having had a hack at the Yankees touring Japan, Stephen Goldman re-discovers his usual form in this article at baseball prospectus. It's worth a read.

Nowhere has the baseball establishment's ostrich-like qualities been more evident than in the continued reaction to the now year-old book Moneyball, Michael Lewis' look at the operations of the Oakland A's front office under the management of Billy Beane. The reception to the book has at times been downright bizarre, including the confused dismissals like those of ESPN's Joe Morgan, who repeatedly insisted that Billy Beane should not have written a book extolling his own genius despite the fact Beane was neither the book's author nor its instigator. Beane cannot be found within its pages cackling like Lex Luthor about how he's smarter than the entire Detroit Tigers organization put together and Dusty Baker too. Yet as recently as this February, a columnist with the Long Beach Press-Telegram perpetuated the myth, writing: "Oakland's Billy Beane has done a terrific job with modest funds with the A's, but he's also a shameless self-promoter who wrote a book about his imagined genius and is despised by scouts around baseball."

The section entitled: ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC should be right up anybody's alley with regards to nature of analysis. It's also a good representation of the state of play between 'stat-heads' and 'traditional scouts'.

- Art Neuro

You don't need a rocket scientist to win baseball?
I know some of you think that my interest in Space Policy and Baseball just don't mix. Then, you find out about Jason Szuminski, graduate of the MIT, US Air Force Lieutenant and pitcher for the San Diego Padres. The man has a degree from MIT in aerospace engineering no less. I might even pick him up for my fantasy team for the sake of tracking his stats this year (darn, there I go again with that hideous pursuit). Anyway, the point is, I'm not the only one who is out there mixing these things in their lives. :)

- Art Neuro

I'd junk it now
Seriously folks... For sale: 1974 Space Shuttle One owner. Driven up to space only a few times. Possible heat-shielding tiles loose. Requires US $700million to make spaceworthy again.
In its time it was the best thing available on the market.

Nothing but Pure Glass
Meanwhile, the folks at NASA are doing this wonderful experiment to make pure glass. Instead of null-grav, they are using electrostatic charges to accomplish this task.
That's about it on a quiet day on the Space Frontier. Not even an interesting baseball article. :)

- Art Neuro

The First Step - Colonising the Moon, Mars or Both?

This is the debate raging now in response to the Bush 'vision' for NASA. In this analysis I shall steer away from intangible benefits of space colonies such as expansion of scientific knowledge and psychological renewal of human society, of which much has been made by other authors, not because I consider them unimportant but for two more hard nosed reasons; that both can be achieved by any space colony or even by an increased robotic presence in space; and the telling arguments against human space colonies are usually economic. "How is it going to pay for itself". Gerard O'Neil's vision did not get realised on precisely these grounds. The power they would have produced was not cheaper than what could currently be had, even without his expensive (though breathtakingly beautiful) orbital living environments burdening the project.

If human governments are going to vote the funds required to colonise the sky they will need to see a payback, or at least an affordable sunk cost. Reasons why we cannot afford not to colonise space in the long term (with humans) shall be dealt with separately ¹ . It will be a stepwise ladder-climbing exercise with each rung making the next possible, which takes a lot of text to lay out. I shall take as an assumption here that it is agreed the ladder must be climbed ² but that we are discussing how to climb it. Most agree though that the first to steps are Mars and Luna but in which order?

The purpose of this essay is to address the currently topical issue of whether Luna or Mars (or both) should be considered the next single rung or whether neither can work without the other and they must be tackled together. The cost of both at once is obviously more burdensome on current human tax payers though so it is last choice for that reason.

1) The first thing to consider in choosing our first colony is the difficulty of getting there & back. This of course effects the cost & so the final economic value of the resources which can be had from there. When I say do the maths though, simply comparing the surface gravities of Earth, Moon and Mars is misleading as it is far to blunt a measure of the energy costs involved.

Body	Surface G (m)	Mass (kg)	Surface Radius (m)	Escape V (km/s)	Escape E (MJ per 10kg)
Earth	1.00	5.97 x 10 24	6360	11.20	626.8
Mars	0.38	6.42 x 10 23	3390	5.02	126.2
Moon	0.17	7.35 x 10 22	1740	2.38	28.2

The energy cost of getting things off Mars is closer to a sixth (not a third) of that from Earth. Getting things off Luna is very cheap indeed. However the specifics of technology can distort even the straight energy costs. Chemical rockets (& any vehicle) involve launching far more than the payload to escape velocity. These distortions make chemical rockets even dearer for use climbing out of Earths gravity well. Mars and Luna can easily use single stage to orbit with 1950s technology but we are only just approaching it now for Earth. The vehicle mass to payload ratio required to ship mass from Earth is more than five times that from Mars. This would seem to not only knock Earth out of the running as an economic supply source but to favour Luna still more. This would indeed be the case except that most of the things we need are not available on Luna (see 3 below).

It has been mentioned that the goods shipped from Mars would come along a long supply line and could not be changed to cope with different conditions at the receiving end whereas Luna, being closer, could be more industrially agile. This is true as far as it goes but when the goods are commodities like metals, propellants, Oxygen, food and water this is not a problem. If commodities needed short agile supply lines we would never have had world spanning silk roads or spice routes in the age of sail. As for manufacturing agility on the moon, why would we support factories there to produce manufactured goods for Earth? More likely the goods would be made on Earth where labour is cheaper and conditions more benign (& proximity no great problem). Luna may support specialised industry because if its hard vacuum an light gravity but though it could compete with Mars for proximity to the main markets - it could not so compete with Earth itself.

2) The second thing to consider is sustainability. i.e. reducing the enormous cost of sustaining an off world colony using materials shipped up the Terran gravity well. Let us consider first, a Lunar colony. Let us examine what materials are available on the Moon:

Compounds	Lunar Basalt (Apollo 11)	Lunar Breccia (Apollo 14)	Lunar Regolith (Apollo 17)
SiO 2	40.46	48.09	44.47
TiO2	10.41	1.51	2.84
Al 2 O 3	10.08	16.72	18.93
FeO	19.22	9.53	10.29
MgO	7.01	10.18	9.95
CaO	11.54	10.67	12.29
Na 2 O	0.38	0.73	0.43
Other	0.90	2.57	0.80

It seems the Moon, with its low gravity has not only lost any atmosphere it ever has to space along with all its Hydrogen, the Hydrogen was lost before it had the chance to cool down and be fixed into the rocks. Certainly, there is plenty of Oxygen and metals but notice the glaring lack of Carbon and Nitrogen - the building blocks of life. Perhaps if these were present we could ship enough missing trace elements for our colony, such as Phosphorus and Sulphur up the well but even with a small number of inhabitants and efficient recycling H, C & N - they are needed in considerable tonnage. There is little prospect of such quantities being boosted up in rockets, shuttles or any near future technology, even if launch costs were halved or quartered. Support for every single person in a Moon colony is going to cost a fortune if done from Earth. Mars on the other hand has a wide variety of minerals, including the metals available on the Moon but it also has a Carbon Dioxide atmosphere also containing Nitrogen. It almost certainly has water also as a Hydrogen source while Luna water is purely theoretical and the only polar orbit probe sent to look for the Luna water (Luna prospector 1998) turned up only tiny (500ppm) concentrations of Hydrogen which may possibly have been in water form. Thus even the wet parts are so dry, extraction would be very costly and may not be feasible.

We can add to these difficulties the lack of an atmosphere, bathing the surface in hard radiation during the Lunar day (28 Earth days) which also results in massive day/night temperature differences (93-393K). While Mars atmosphere is thin it is sufficient to shield the surface from this radiation and it has a 24 hour day. As a result, Luna colonists would live in deep windowless bunkers well beneath the surface while Martian colonists could inhabit the surface of their world.

In other words, a Martian colony has the potential not only to support itself with minimal supplies from Earth but also may supply the expansion into the Solar system from a gravity well far shallower than Earths. It can support long term human occupation on its surface. Luna cannot do this. It may, by proximity to Earth, become important once there are Martian and/or asteroid colonies to supply traffic. It may be an important but expensively supported scientific and/or military base ...but it is not the first step into space nor even a required part of our first step.

3) Third is the resources that can be extracted from the colony. This factor determines whether the colony will pay its way in the end as well as whether it can contribute to or act as a drag upon our prosecution of other space objectives like the asteroids and gas giant moons etc. As has already been shown, Mars can supply what a Moon colony needs but not vice versa. The cost of supplying either from Earth would be enormous and would not become affordable until launch costs drop by at least two orders of magnitude (about a hundred times).

The top few centimetres of Luna Regolith is impregnated with He3 from the solar wind which may become an important Nuclear Fusion fuel in the future. This element is very rare in the inner system (including Earth and Mars). Thus strip mining lunar soil to supply the energy needs of Earth and other space colonies may be important at some point. The He3 is however present in very tiny concentrations (four parts per billion) so extraction may be a fairly marginal operation. He3 is abundant in the outer system however so the focus of a fusion economy would undoubtedly shift there before long.

Furthermore the materials needed to colonise the Asteroids, as must be done for the safety of the Earth quite apart from extracting the many mineral resources, are the same as for the moon: Organics (C, H, N), Oxygen, Propellants, reaction mass and metals. Mars can supply them and moon can't. Simple as that. Furthermore the ballistic cost of getting any material from Mars is in the same ballpark as it would be from the Moon. Thus we might eventually choose to source some metals from Luna and we may use it as a steady base for telescopes, weapons etc but there is no great economic need to do so & we cannot do just Luna if our eyes are on the rest or the solar system. Whereas not colonising Mars and getting what we need from Luna is just not an option (the stuff isn't there). It is all there on Earth but the shipping costs make Terran resources many of times as expensive. It is however all there on Mars and for competitive energy costs too. QED

- David

^1,2 Should anyone disagree with these premises, I will post separate essays to address them.

Eisntein's brainchild to take a hike up to orbit
NASA is going to do this experiment based on Einstein's theory of relativity. For more information on the 'Gravity probe B' as it is known, please look here (not that it fills you in a great deal). The best bit I guess is this 1 paragraph out of three:

"The experiment will check, very precisely, tiny changes in the direction of spin of four gyroscopes contained in an Earth satellite orbiting at 400-mile altitude directly over the poles. So free are the gyroscopes from disturbance that they will provide an almost perfect space-time reference system. They will measure how space and time are warped by the presence of the Earth, and, more profoundly, how the Earth's rotation drags space-time around with it. These effects, though small for the Earth, have far-reaching implications for the nature of matter and the structure of the Universe."

We wish them all the success.

- Art Neuro

Uh-oh...
In space, nobody can hear you scream, but they can sure hear you play drums with sheet metal. Okay, a bit flippant, but it seems there's something screwed loose on the International Space Station.
Not every encouraging to hear right now.

- Art Neuro

Controlling Greenhouse gasses
This is some stuff I had to research for my job.

Overview:
In trying to control greenhouse gasses, there are three approaches.

One is to reduce emissions. Second is to energy forms that don’t produce carbon, eg solar, nuclear, lunar. Third is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; by pumping it underground or putting it into the sea, etc. This is sometimes referred to as ‘offsetting’ or sequestration.

Reducing emissions
The bulk of the Kyoto Protocol is aimed at controlling the amount of carbon that is released into the air through industry By using better technology Perhaps the cost of complying with the protocol could be spent in a more constructive way to solve the problem?

Reducing emissions may suit a MEDC, but it locks out LEDCs from achieving the same standard of living as people in MEDCs. The LEDC nations argue that people from their countries have the right to a living standard like those of the MEDCs.
Emissions will inevitably grow as industry and commerce spreads its wings across the globe.

Section 1. Reducing Emissions.
We could reduce emissions if we stopped making so much of the stuff, however this would become an issue of contention between MEDCs and LEDCs. Many strategies are put in place with the aim of reducing emissions.

If electricity was generated with non carbon energy, it would be wonderful. However it is difficult to store it. Batteries don’t hold much and waste energy as they are charged. The challenge is to find a portable fuel.

Electric cars, Hybrid cars
To accelerate and go up hills we need a large motor. A small motor is running steadily will be more efficient. If energy of going downhill and braking is recovered and stored as say electricity then less carbon based fuel will be needed.

In the late 1990s, Toyota brought to the market a hybrid engine car. It basically works by having 2 motors; one is a conventional petroleum combustion engine, but the other is an electric motor. The two work in concert, or one switches off, depending on the situation. This vehicle dramatically reduces CO2 emissions compared to the conventional petroleum combustion engine car.

Co-firing at Coal-fire stokers
The most obvious place to reduce emissions is to increase the efficiency of already existing technology. Because so much of the world’s electricity generation depends on coal fire, it becomes critical to first reduce emissions at these sites. Most of the benefits of Co-firing involve increasing the efficiency of combustion in coal fire stations and so, using the coal for more energy.

Negawatts
This concept was devised by one Amory Lovins in the 1970s. Basically, it is a system where consumers are given incentives to use more energy efficient electrical products. By crediting people with how much electricity they didn’t spend and therefore did not contribute to the greenhouse emissions, the electric companies could reduce the demand to build more generators quickly.

The problem with the negawatts concept played itself out in California during the power outages in 2003. Because privatised energy companies were given incentives not to make more new generators and actually got paid not to produce electricity, the power companies failed to meet the actual demand of the marketplace. Enron, made a large paper profit in the process.

Section 2. Alternative fuels.
Because the vast majority of the fuels we use to generate power are fossil fuels, and they are the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, we need to look a little closer at alternative fuels.

Methane
The number one agenda is reducing emissions of Greenhouse gasses and the two main culprits are Carbon Dioxide and Methane. Of the two, Methane is much more harmful in its effect, but Methane also has the benefit of being a valuable fuel.

In fact, how good is methane? Compared to coal with its long chain of carbon, methane’s simple CH4 structure allows it to give off 2 water molecules per Carbon instead of one per carbon. (Apart from its greenhouse gas emissions, coal also has other downsides that do not get discussed. For instance, burning coal releases radon into the air and radon is radioactive.)

Methane occurs naturally in great quantities in forms other thatn simply natural gas.. So much so that it is a greenhouse hazard all of its own. There are huge methane sources in the peat under the retreating ice in the northern hemisphere, as well as locked into ice as clathrates at the bottom of the sea, waiting to be unfrozen. There is some fear that with global warming, these clathrate-locked methane will be freed and sent to the surface and into the atmosphere. Geological history shows some samples where this has happened to much catastrophic effect.

One worry is that methane is being produced in rice paddies and garbage tips, by vegetation rotting in hydroelectric dams, and by ruminant animals. As we increase our population, more and more methane is being produced.
NB Methane is around 20 worse than CO2, so burning it helps greatly.

Biodeisel
The first Deisel Engine was shown in 1900. The aim of that exercise was to invent a motor that could run on vegetable oils. In fact, Deisel’s engine ran on peanut oil. If we could convert a significant fleet of our trucks to biodeisel, then we are lowering our dependence on fossil fuels, and this should slow the process of emissions; the theory being that to get biodeisel, you have to grow the bio-source, and this process takes carbon out of the atmosphere, instead of introducing new ones out of the ground. Biodeisel has the added advantage of not having toxic emissions that are normally associated with fossil fuel diesel engines.

One of the issues with industrial usages of Biodeisel is that the quantities of land that must be turned into a fuel source is so vast that it cannot be economically sustainable. The other obvious problem is that repeated usage of land to harvest fuels for biodeisel, inevitably leads to soil degradation of that land.

The other often-cited alternative is to use recycled cooking oils. Diesel engines are quite forgiving and can burn a wide range of fuels. It also has the added benefit of being able to reduce the pollution problems arising from discarding cooking oils.

Nuclear Fission
Splitting heavy atoms harnesses a great deal of energy. If you did it instantaneously, you have the atomic bomb. Doing it slowly in controlled conditions yields what is used as nuclear power. If anybody is interested in the significance of the e=mc2 equation, nuclear fission is its practical application.

Nuclear fission is often touted as a powerful alternative to burning fossil fuels but the detractors point to the nuclear waste that is the by-product of the process of generating energy through these means. The usual way to dispose of nuclear waste is to dig a deep hole and stick it in, but this has problems in terms of leakages of waste matter into the water table.
Having said that, there are other means of disposing this nuclear waste, most notably to fire them into ocean troughs where subduction is taking place. That way, the nuclear waste gets subducted into the earth’s mantle before they can cause environmental damage.

Nuclear Fusion
Fusion is the other nuclear fuel source, it is the way energy if generated in the sun. In some ways it is more promising because of the energy yields projected through this method. There is also the added benefit of less and fewer nuclear waste.

However, Fusion also has several problems. For fusion to work, it needs tritium. A Hydrogen atom with 1 extra neutron is Deuterium of which there are substantial amounts. Tritium on the other hand is considerably more rare. To make tritium we need the help of Lithium, and the supply of lithium is not so abundant. So the economic and energy cost of fusion is not easily surmounted.
Thus, the technology to make nuclear fusion work seems to be in the considerable future.

Radioactivity in the earth
Rocks underground can become hot due to natural radioactive decay. If the rocks are cracked the right way water can be pumped down one hole and then up another. The hot water can then generate steam and power.

Hydrogen fuel
Hydrogen is like electricity, it usually carries energy put in from some other process. It has been touted for a long time. The major problem with hydrogen is producing it, and storing it.
How can hydrogen be sourced? We can make it from gas or coal, but this produces CO2.
We can split it out of water using electolysis. however to does requires energy. If this energy does not come from a renewable source such as solar, wind or tides, then the energy spent in harvesting the Hydrogen will send carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Storing problems: in its pure form, H2 is the smallest naturally occurring molecule. It will leak through rubber, it will make iron britle.
Scientists have been trying to emulsify hydrogen in other liquids, or even having them stored in solids designed to absorb hydrogen.

Solar energy
Solar energy is the cleanest source of energy. It is abundant and constant. There are several methods of harnessing solar energy:

- Photovoltaics
Photovoltaic solar cells, which directly convert sunlight into electricity, are made of semiconducting materials. The simplest cells power watches and calculators and the like, while more complex systems can light houses and provide power to the electric grid. The main stumbling block for this method is the inefficiencies in converting it into something that is useful. Then there is the issue of where industrial amounts of solar energy can be harvested. However, this technology is always increasing in its efficiency and still promises to be a source of energy in the future.

- Passive solar heating, cooling and day-lighting
Buildings designed for passive solar and daylighting use design features such as large sunward-facing windows and building materials that absorb and slowly release the sun's heat. No mechanical means are utilised in passive solar heating. Incorporating passive solar designs can reduce heating bills as much as 50 percent. Passive solar designs can also include natural ventilation for cooling.

- Concentrating Solar power
Concentrating solar power technologies use reflective materials such as mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy. This concentrated heat energy is then converted into electricity.

The major issues in solar heating are access to the sun and the cost of implementing the systems.

Wind
Wind power is an alternative form of solar energy. By harnessing currents in the air that are created by cool and hot areas, we have an alternative source of energy.

Wind power is good for many reasons
1) It is emissions free in the generating process.
2) It is a renewable resource.
3) It lessens the dependence and burden on Fossil fuels
4) It can be used in conjunction with battery storage to provide constant power.
5) Low cost. Costs for wind power are falling across North America and Europe. The equipment is commercially available.
6) A lot of know-how is accumulated with this technology because it is in fact quite old.

The arguments against generating power through wind are rather perplexing. Wind machines must be located where strong, dependable winds are available most of the time.
1. Because winds do not blow strongly enough to produce power all the time, energy from wind machines is considered "intermittent”. Thus, electricity from wind machines must have a back-up supply from another source.
2. As wind power is "intermittent," utility companies can use it for only part of their total energy needs.
3. Maintenance costs. Wind towers and turbine blades are subject to damage from high winds and lighting. Rotating parts that are located high off the ground can be difficult and expensive to repair.
4. Wind turbine technologies vary in the quality of the power produced, which can cause difficulties in linking certain types of wind turbines to a utility system.
5. The noise made by rotating wind machine blades (especially by smaller, non-utility-scale turbines) can be annoying to nearby neighbours. Modern utility-scale wind turbines are usually located in very windy areas, and are highly aerodynamic, so any noise from the wind turbines is drowned out by the noise of the wind itself.
6. Some people complain about aesthetics of wind machines.
Although it has to be pointed out that the industrial energy required to make the wind turbines using modern composites is energy intensive, so win energy turbines are only partly free of emissions.

Hydro
Hydro comes from falling water and is another form of solar energy.

Section 3. Active reduction or subtraction of Carbon from the atmosphere
Part 1. Biomass Method:

Sequestering in Trees.
Plant-life uses Carbon dioxide in its process known as photosynthesis. During the day, plant-life absorbs carbon dioxide for growth.
Part of the rise in the world’s carbon dioxide has been blamed on deforestation around the world, and the subsequent absence of enough photosynthesis. In response to this, many governments have commenced a programme of planting forests in order to sequester carbon into trees.

Trees and Photosynthesis is actually a very inefficient way of sequestering Carbon. Even if we plant trees as fast as we chop them, we still will not catch up with the increased emissions, and this in itself is a problem. Also, the land that is available to be committed for the purpose of sequestering carbon in trees will run out. Given the inefficiency, it can only be a temporary solution.

Really we should make sure that the products we use from trees is buried underground or deep in the mud of the ocean floor. This way the carbon won’t get back into the atmosphere.

The ‘Geritol’ solution.
Some time in the 1980s, Oceanographer John Martin did a study of the world’s oceans correlating life and fecund ocean environments to concentration of iron in the water, and the lack of life in barren waters to the lack of iron. From there, John Martin postulated that life in the barren waters was held back by the iron shortage. He went public with his claim in 1987.

John Martin proposed that if iron were sent into the barren waters, they would become fecund with phytoplankton; the phytoplankton would then be able to absorb carbon dioxide. In fact, John Martin claimed that given sufficient iron, the new areas of ocean would be able to suck so much CO2 from the atmosphere, it could start an ice age. Oceanographers laughed at this hypothesis and referred to it as the ‘geritol solution’ after the famous iron supplement for the elderly. John Martin died in 1993 before the first expedition set out to carry out the experiment near the Galapagos Islands.

A section of the ocean considered barren and without life, was ‘seeded’ with iron from the back of a boat to see if John Martin’s hypothesis was correct. The results of the experiment were drastic: overnight, phytoplankton bloomed in the areas where iron was dropped, and the ocean went green with algae. John Martin was proved correct.

The algae bloom suddenly blossomed in a sea that was barren because the seeded iron catalysed its growth. Martin’s iron hypothesis had turned into a fact that ocean ecologies were indeed dependent on the concentration of iron in the waters.

However, there were some things that emerged from this experiment. As soon as the phytoplankton bloomed, zooplankton moved into the area to feast on the fresh algae bloom, and before the CO2 could be absorbed from the atmosphere, the zooplankton contributed its own CO2 into the air. Subsequent experiments showed that slowly releasing the iron helped slow down this process sufficiently for the CO2 to be absorbed from the atmosphere before the zooplankton ate up the algae.
This meant that the speed at which the iron was released became crucial for the process to work as an effective carbon sink.

There are ramifications and questions:
a) If we start doing the ‘geritol’ solution, then we will be committed to doing this forever eternal, as it factors into the carbon balance in the atmosphere.
b) In committing to this course of action, we must also reduce emissions; otherwise there is a limit to the amount of ocean surface area that can be used as to soak carbon.
c) How much ocean is there to seed? and how much carbon emission will it account for?

Of all the solutions, it should be noted this one has the most far-reaching potential. John Martin felt even a little manipulation of the Ocean could lower the average temperature of the planet substantially.

Part 2. Inorganic Solution

Pump it ito the ground
Just emulsify and pump them into the holes of old gas or oil fields

Pumping the CO2 to the bottom of the deep blue sea.
The First method is to store the carbon in solution as bicarbonate.

CO2 + H2O -> H2Co3

However, this is an acid, so it breaks into:

H2CO3 -> H + HCO3
HCO3 -> H + CO3

Now using the concept of weathering limestone and granite:

Limestone:
CaCO3 + 2H2CO3 -> Ca + 2HCO3

Silicates (in a very complex equation):
CaSi3 + 2H2CO3 -> Ca + 2HCO3 + SiO2 +H20

Once these dissolved ions come to the sea, they can get mineral formation.

Pump CO2 deep into the ocean
Pump the CO2 deep into the ocean and have the CO2 stored in liquid form. This method involves a fairly high level of engineering, as deep underwater pressures on pipes are a technological challenge.

Clathrate
Store the CO2 in what is known as a clathrate. This involves a little bit of physical chemistry. It is possible to form lattices with Water molecule.

- Art Neuro

Come on, give it a break.
One of my favourite columnists State-side is Steven Goldman who writes a weekly column 'The Pinstriped Bible' for the YES network. I wait for it each week with baited breath. The man is a witty, literary, raconteur of all things Yankee baseball. Unfortunately, today's column was a bit of a diss-job on the recent tour of Japan where they played 2 of their 162 regular season games in Japan.

"The location of the games was drab and uninteresting, a Pacific clone of the Metrodome or the Trop Dome complete with Astroturf, a vile substance that has mostly been eliminated from the Major League game. So closely did the ballpark resemble Tampa Bay's gray home field that it was hard to tell that the teams had left the country. There are people alive today who believe the 1969 moon shot did not happen, that the lunar landing was created on a television sound stage. These same people may now claim that the Yankees did not go to Japan either, and it will be hard to argue with them. What about all the Japanese in the stands? Easy. They were extras.

"In an alternate universe, the Yankees played at the Japanese equivalent of Camden Yards, with cherry blossoms festooning the grandstand and Mount Fuji looming over the outfield wall. Apparently that park does not exist. That location would have been worth the trip. This one wasn't, so we're still without a rationale for the Detour."

Then he rips:

"Yankees broadcasts are among the game's most lucrative products. Putting them on at a time when no American can watch them makes zero sense, especially for a trip that has no definable purpose. It's spitting the face of the very audience that keeps the game alive. Next time, please — send the Brewers. No one cares about them anyway.

"Just in: as part of the brilliant marketing initiative to make baseball unavailable to American baseball fans, this year's World Series will be held at an undisclosed location near the Arctic Circle. Reserve your tickets now, and maybe they'll let you know where you can pick them up."

For a man of great erudition and open-minded-ness, this article is just plain mean. Mr. Goldman, with all due respect, occasionally, you can share your Yankees with its fans world-wide; that's what it means to go global. As it is, the 2 season games you complain about were home games for Tampa Bay, so if anything, it was Tampa Bay fans (all four of them) who lost 2 home games to attend. It's not like the actual home fans of the Yankees miss out on anything except a couple of hours sleep. The point, Mr. Goldman, was that the Yankees went to Japan to play games that 'meant something' in the scheme of the season; not exhibition circus jobs like Ruth's '34 tour or Stengel's '55 tour.
Anyway. It's not like this really matters because the Yankees exactly aren't going to help us get to space and as Dave Brew calls it, baseball is part of the big smoke that keeps us distracted from the big picture (well, young Alvy Singer had trouble with too much big picture didn't he?).

The other half of the article about Kenny Lofton and a joking proposal to trade for Cleveland Centerfielder Milton Bradley is his ususal funny self.

- Art Neuro

It puts a real dampener on things
In Annie Hall, a young Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character as a kid) gets taken to a doctor for depression. When asked why he is so depressed, Alvy replies: "Well, the Universe is everything and if it's expanding every day. Someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!"
Mother: "What is that your business? (turns to doctor) He stopped doing his homework. "
Alvy: "What's the point?"
Mother: "What has the Universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!"
Doctor: "It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here.
Alvy can now rest assured it's not going to break apart, but that instead it is going to be sucked up its own fundament.
Today, Space.com tells us they are getting a bead on the Black Hole that sits somewhere in the middle of our Galaxy, just sucking everything up. That's right, our portion of the Universe will not end with a bang but with a gurgle.
I think I'd better go to Alvy's Doctor now.

Who talks to Earthlings in the Middle of the Night?
In biblical times it used to be God. These days, people are expending a lot of effort trying to listen out for ET's phone conversations. While the SETI thing is interesting, and may represent a quicker road to space, "Hey guys, can you sell us the blueprints for your UFO?" it does seem like one heck of a long shot. For my money I would rather have this effort put into mapping rogue asteroids as they represent a clear and present danger.
The article itself is written in a really goofy jocular style that reads "GEEK ALERT!" with red-and-blue spinning lights and a siren to pierce your skull. No wonder people don't want to engage with the issue of space. It means having to deal with geeks, and nerds.
Time to go look for a real job now.

- Art Neuro

Glad I didn't bother
As a follow up to the absurd job-ad for Bulldogs CEO, I think it appropriate that I link this announcement today. So much for my master plan to fix that club. There go my 'Moneyball' ambitions to turn the Bulldogs upside down, inside out, and into a 21st Century Sporting Franchise that we would not feel ashamed to present to the world. While I do not know Mr. Noad, one gets the feeling it's going to be the same-old-same-old. Watch out for the next scandal folks, if Mr. Noad doesn't do what I would've done. :)

Now, the issue of job hunting. Is there anything more absurd than the job-ads that ask for "motivated" "energetic" "self-starters" who have "a fine eye for detail", who are "team players" and are "outcomes driven"? Are these people morons?

"Dear sir/madam, I am an undermotivated, lazy, selfish, tardy, messy, generally slack person who is applying for your advertised position of 'editor of on-line content'. As a supremely undermotivated, positively lazy, perpetually tardy, rather messy, intentionally slack person, I believe I bring absolutely nothing to the table except my meager skills as an on-line content editor; beyond that I wish to bring nothing more to the table than my Nintendo Gameboy platinum. Details bore me. So does criticism and analysis, constructive or not, I do not care. I don't care much either for company slogans, corporate identity, notions of loyalty to the company or loyalty to commerce, truth, justice, or the Amway way. In that sense, I am 'care-free'. I never do things unless I am ordered. I'd be damned if I'd do anything if nobody asked, and simply asking isn't enough to make me do it, even if you raise your voice. Frankly if you want me to do some tedious shite, you'll just have to scream at the top of your lungs, and pray for a miracle. At least I don't lie about myself, and I never let honesty have any discourse with my beauty whatever that may mean. I loathe the banal up-beatness of your ad calling for an energetic type when clearly you have not expended even a sad litttle erg in thinking what or whom may be out here in the real world. I hate the stupidity of your ad with which you ask for people to present themselves as somehow something that they might not be, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I hate work. I really do. Especially repetitve stuff and un-intellectual stuff, and things that require I lobotomise myself for the sake of my sanity. I hate doing customer service; frankly I hate customers, clients and people I have to kowtow to for reasons that are in the scheme of things, rather trivial. I don't believe in dead-lines, I don't believe in quality, I don't believe that it can be "done by Friday" nor that it would be "good", let alone "be done well AND be by Friday". I take pride in how little effort I put in to my slipshod work, especially when I see it stand the test of time without falling over or getting torn down, in spite of its badness, awfulness, horribleness. I am an inefficient, ineffectual paycheck-collector; a disrespectful time-waster by birth and by choice; an eighth dan grand master of procrastination; and I even have a blog that I wish to continue writing on, on company time, on your company's computer on your company's internet account... And even then I am too good for your company and the money you're offering for the position just plain sucks. You really ought to be ashamed of yourself."

- Art Neuro

*addendum*: This joke came in yesterday so I thought I should place it here:
Little Brucie was in his junior school class when the teacher asked the children what their fathers do for a living. All the typical answers came up, fireman, policeman, salesman, etc. Brucie was being uncharacteristically quiet and so the teacher asked him about his father.

"My father is an exotic dancer in a gay club and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes, if the offer is really good, he'll go out with a man, rent a cheap room and let them sleep with him".

The teacher hurriedly set the other children to work on some colouring and then took little Brucie aside to ask him, "Is that really true
about your father?"....
"No", said Brucie, "My father plays footy for the Bulldogs, but I was just too embarrassed to say.

Moneyball? Ain't no money here...
Michael Lewis, author of 'Moneyball', has recently penned this amazing article about his Highschool Baseball Coach 'Fitz'. As a baseball coach, I am not 100th of this man. As a man, it makes me wonder if I am 100th of this man.
It's a marvelous read. Don't miss it.

- Art Neuro