Any Given Sunday With Drew Henson And Bill Parcells
Here it goes..
Here's the latest report on our erstwhile kid quarterback, but you need registration to sign in. Instead I've copied and pasted the entire article without permission. Very bad of me.

POSTCARDS FROM THE LEDGEPlaying Drew could reap Super benefitsBy Jim ReevesStar-Telegram Staff Writer

Bill Parcells is right. Winning is the ultimate goal. But it's not about winning meaningless games in the midst of a lost season. It's not about going 5-11, or 6-10. It's about winning Super Bowls. He, of all people, should know that. Certainly we know that around here. We've been to the mountaintop. We want to go there again.
You do that by building around a quarterback. The Cowboys haven't had one to build around since Troy Aikman's heyday. What was that, 10 years ago? Nine? Almost too long to remember.

Around here, Super Bowl success has always been associated with a strong quarterback. Roger Staubach won two; Aikman claimed three. What we know, what even Parcells must admit, is that Vinny Testaverde won't take the Cowboys to a Super Bowl. Drew Henson? Who knows? That's what all the complaining is about. It's why Jerry Jones isn't happy. We all want to find out. We need to find out if Henson is the man. The problem is, Big Bill has become shortsighted in his old age. He's focused on winning the next game, not the next Lombardi Trophy. He's trying to get the Cowboys into the playoffs -- where they really have no business this year, anyway -- instead of to Super Bowl (insert whatever Roman numeral you want to shoot for here). It's just not in Parcells' nature not to try to go for a winnable game, like Thursday's, with whatever is at his disposal.

Henson, in his first NFL start, was struggling. Enter Testaverde at halftime. "I think Drew Henson is going to be an excellent player. Bill Parcells thinks he's a good player, too," former Saints general manager Randy Mueller said on ESPN Radio on Friday. "I think he [Parcells] will develop Drew Henson, but not at the cost of losing a game. "At halftime [Thursday], Bill saw how bad the Bears were and knew if [the Cowboys] didn't screw it up, they could win the game."

And they did. Buthow much further down the road would the Cowboys be today if Parcells had put the kid back out there and he had won the game? How much more confidence would Henson have gained? How much closer would the Cowboys be to their next Super Bowl? Closer than they are today with Testaverde stepping in to win it.

Parcells' own words betray him. "Right now, he needs more work," Parcells said of Henson. "The guy hasn't played a lot of football." There's a remedy for both those problems, and it's the same cure: Play him. Parcells also underestimates and dishonors Cowboys fans when he said he didn't care if they booed, that he has "other people's interests to think about." What he needs to understand is that it's not about him. It's not even about the players. It's about the Cowboys as a franchise, and that includes their fans. At least they understand that it's not about winning games; it's about winning Super Bowls.

Hmmm. There you go. Drew Henson might turn out to be a prospect who burned out in 2 sports rather than just one.

- Art Neuro

Artificial Gravitas
NASA are finally working on the problem of low-gravity effects on the body during long service in space. They are calling it artificial gravity, but it's not the stuff of Star Trek, it's the big 'centrifugal' wheel that generates a centripital force simulating gravity. That's right. Just like the one you've seen on '2001: a Space Odyssey'.

A major undertaking in artificial gravity research is being prepared at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, overseen by NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Starting next year at UTMB, a corps of individuals will partake in bed rest studies that reproduce the effects of weightlessness, with half that group also rotated once a day on a centrifuge.

The new centrifuge has been built for NASA by Wyle Laboratories, headquartered in El Segundo, California, for use in studying the effects of artificial gravity as a countermeasure to the negative effects of long-term microgravity on the human body. That newly-built centrifuge has recently been installed at UTMB. "It's a really beautiful device," Young said. Young is co-investigator for the work, teamed with William Paloski, principal scientist, in the Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

The NASA-sponsored research is divided into two phases. The first phase is using the short radius centrifuge -- which has a radius of 10 feet (three meters) radius to support NASA's Artificial Gravity Pilot Study. A second phase will include significant enhancements to the centrifuge design to provide support for a multinational artificial gravity project that would involve Germany and Russia, Young added. The Artificial Gravity Project Pilot Study involves test subjects being placed in a six degree head-down bed-rest position which simulates the effects of microgravity on a human body. The test subjects are then positioned in the short radius centrifuge and subjected up to 2.5 Gs at their feet to simulate a gravity environment.

"As far as I'm concerned," Young concluded, "the purpose of all these studies is not to show how to use artificial gravity. Rather, it is to determine whether or not artificial gravity is an acceptable solution."

There used to be a a piece of graffiti somewhere: "There is no such thing as Gravity; the Earth Sucks".
Somehow it never left my mind.

A New Style Of Pumping Gas In Texas
This is interesting. They are finally sequestering carbon into disused oil mines, presumably from whence they came. Active sequestration, if successful is a good idea (Obviously, if it doesn't produce more Carbon gasses than it sequesters). There some problems with it, but it's worth trying.

In the depleted South Liberty oil field near the town of Dayton, a University of Texas team successfully pumped 1,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide -- the principal greenhouse gas -- into the reservoirs of briny water more than 5,000 feet underground.

Scientists say those porous rock formations, which extend for hundreds of miles from Mexico to Alabama, could be ideally suited to storing the greenhouse gases widely blamed for global warming.

"We have lot of oil and gas fields in this area that are in decline," Susan Hovorka, a University of Texas geologist and the lead researcher on the pilot project told Reuters. "The Gulf Coast is one of the best places on earth for this." The technology,
known as carbon sequestration, has attracted global attention from industries and governments that are eager to capture and bottle up the gas that can linger in the atmosphere for decades. The gases released by burning fossil fuels, scientists say, are the main cause of global warming, which is expected over time to lift the planet's temperatures and sharply alter weather patterns, raising sea levels and causing devastating storms.

With Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol earlier this month clearing the way for the environment pact to come into force in February and the start of the European Union's carbon dioxide emissions trading market just a month away, demand for methods for eliminating or storing the gas are on the rise.

Then there's this bit:

Hovorka said a preliminary estimate of the amount of carbon dioxide storage
capacity along the coast regions of the Gulf of Mexico put the figure at about 300 billion tons -- enough to hold 1,000 years of pollution from the region at the current rate.

Many hurdles -- both technical and economic -- remain before carbon sequestration can develop as a viable enterprise, Christopher said, but much of the expertise and at least a limited transportation network already exists.

Since the 1970s, oil and gas drillers have injected carbon dioxide into oil wells in a process called enhanced oil recovery that increases the output from those sites.

"This is something we know how to do. We've been doing it for 30 years in West Texas," he said. Houston-based energy company Kinder Morgan Inc. ships a billion cubic feet a day of the gas through its 1,100 miles pipeline network, much of it from Colorado into the West Texas oil fields.

That pipeline system would need to be vastly expanded to reach the major carbon dioxide emitters on the other side of the state -- an expensive and complicated endeavor but one the company has considered.

"If the opportunity is there and it's attractive, we want to be a part of it," said Rick
Rainey, spokesman for Kinder Morgan.

So there you go. Concrete, practical steps. We are not done for... yet. :)

- Art Neuro

Translated Transcription of Interview With Hideki Matsui
Hideki Matsui of the New York Yankees has been interviewed briefly by the Yomiuri newspaper.
Here's my translation of the transcription if anybody is interested.

- Interview by Fujio Tanaka.
Q: You've started training already.
A: Yes. I'm 30 now, so if I rest too much, I start putting on excess weight.

Q: Will you re-start your training once you return to Japan?
A: Yes, probably. I'll be busy with things like having to go to the bat maker for changes to the bat.

Q: You've been making small changes to the bat each year. What changes will you make this year?
A: Not much this year. I might move the centre of gravity towards the handle a little bit.

Q: But there's great significance even in small changes.
A: Well yeah. If you move the centre of gravity towards the handle, the centre of percussion will move towards the grip as well, and that might make it harder to get jammed on the inside.

Q: Yes, you did seem to get jammed on the inside a lot last year.
A: Yeah, because I'm keeping my timing for the outside fastball. So when you go to swing for the inside fastball from that stance, it gets uncomfortable and you end up getting jammed.

Q: When you were with the Giants you were looking at the inside high pitch.
A: Yeah. If you adjusted to the course where the ball appears the fastest, then it seemed easy to hit the ball on the sweetspot, where ever it came. The opposite, where you look at the outside pitch and adjust for the inside pitch is a lot harder.

Q: Yet you have to keep the outside pitch in mind.
A: Yes, they totally pitch to the outside corner. I figured if they jammed me inside, I'd just have to accept that as a consequence of my approach.

Q: So now you're not satsified with that.
A: Well, actually it's more a change of my thinking. From a situation where I was forced to think about the outside fastball, I want to think about the inside pitch in addition to that, broadening my base. In the end, I want to increase the percentage of the longball.

Q: If you move the centre of the gravity towards the handle, it will increase the swing speed.
A: That may be one outcome.

Q: ...But centrifugal force will diminish, so you need to strengthen more.
A: Actually, I mainly work with strengthening my torso, but if you can hit the ball at a good point, you can actually carry it into the stands easily.

Q: So this is an off-season where you review your approach.
A: Yes. I spent a lot of time last year analysing my opponents. So maybe I've grown in that sense.

It's pretty interesting. Of course there's no such thing as 'centrifugal' force. It's centripetal force. However it's swing speed that's needed. Generally speaking, you hit the ball further with a lighter bat going fast than a heavier bat going slow. So Godzilla is on track.
I'm keeping him for next year. :)

- Art Neuro

Running Hot And Cold When Two Worlds Vanish
Arctic Peoples are trying to team up with Tropical Island folks in trying to raise awareness and combat global warming.

"We are two of the world's most vulnerable areas," Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), said of the low-lying islands -- at risk from rising sea levels -- and the Arctic -- where the ice is melting.

"Linking up makes a lot of sense," Watt-Cloutier, whose organization says it represents 155,000 people in Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Russia, told Reuters on Thursday.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet because of a build-up of gases from fossil fuels burned in cars, factories and power plants, according to a report by 250 scientists from 8 countries this month. That could make the North Pole ice-free in summer by 2100, driving species like polar bears toward extinction and undermining indigenous hunting cultures, the report says.

In turn, a global thaw could push up sea levels by almost a meter (3 ft) by 2100, according to U.N. projections, threatening to sink low-lying Pacific island states like Tuvalu or the Marshall Islands or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

With their homes under threat, many indigenous peoples in the Arctic and islanders say the United States, the world's biggest polluter, bears much of the blame for global warming after Washington rejected caps on emissions under the 128-nation Kyoto protocol.

I don't know what's worse. The Kyoto protocol is a sticky tape solution to a very complex, humungous problem. It is inadequate and will draw funds away from finding alternatives to fossil fuel energy use. It's a bit like a small room with 128 people marginally promising not to exhale and breathe as much going into the future, promising that their kids who will increase the number in the room will do as agreed. Then there's the inordinately large guy who eats way more than his fair share who says, "No fuck off, I'm not going to agree to that, not even as a symbolic gesture. Me and my kids are going to burp, fart and exhale as much as we like!"

One shakes one's head.
I'm not a Greenie, but this situation plain sucks. Yet, I guess as a civilisation we're hooked on just burning stuff for energy, come hell or highwater, and at the rate we're going we'll be getting both.

- Art Neuro

Complaints Department
The American Physical Society is making its objections to the Moon, Mars and Beyond Initiative. The gist of their argument is that it might cost more than projected and the over-runs might take away from other scientific projects.

Returning Americans to the Moon and landing on Mars would have a powerful symbolic significance, the APS report observes, but it would constitute only a small step in the advancement of knowledge, since much will already be known from exploration with the robotic precursor probes that are necessary to guarantee the safety of any human mission.

The APS report was authored by a 10-person group, with the committee chaired by Joel Primack, a professor of physics and a leading astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

According to their web site, the American Physical Society is the world's largest professional body of physicists, representing more than 45,000 physicists in academia and industry in the United States and internationally. It has offices in College Park, Maryland and Ridge, New York.

The other objection seems to be that the initiaitve is ill-defined. Well, methinks that getting there and anddoing stuff is pretty good enough at this point. As you may all know it is our contention that there are plenty of reasons to go. Not nearly any good enough reasons not to go.

Still, it's a thought-provoking read.

Test Your Space Trivia
Right here. This one is good:

7. In the "Star Wars" films, the Imperial TIE Fighters are propelled by ion engines (TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine). While these spacecraft are fictional, real ion engines power some of today's spacecraft.

Fact or Fiction!?
Go knock yourself out. :)

- Art Neuro

Russia And Brazil
...have signed a pact to cooperate in space. Brazil has the Alcantra launch facility, close to the equator. Why don't we have a luanch site on Cape York? Grrr!!!

The document signed by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Russian President Vladimir Putin evokes "development of a modernized version" of Brazil's satellite launch rocket known as the VLS-1 as well as development of new models.

It also calls for joint work on development of geostationary satellites to be used for communication and navigation and for cooperation on improving the infrastructure at Brazil's Alcantara launch facility.

While the memorandum of understanding spelled out no timetable, Lula said it gave Brazil "renewed optimism and determination" to pursue its national plans for launching commercial satellites from the Alcantara site. The Alcantara facility is located near the equator, which makes satellite launches considerably less costly, and Brazil has made clear its intention to become a viable space power.

Brazil! A Space power! Come on Canberra. Where is your vision thing?! Where's 'The Plan' for a Space Industry, goddamnit!
Ugh.

- Art Neuro

Planets X, Y & Z
Here's an interesting one. There might be even more planets belonging to our solar system out there.

Last November, Mike Brown's team found a world at least half as large as Pluto. They named it Sedna, after the Inuit sea goddess. Sedna's elongated orbit is outside the Kuiper Belt, ranging from 76 to 1,000 AU. Sedna was found only because it is currently near the innermost stretch of its travels.

Well past Sedna is another reservoir of material left over from the formation of the solar system, theorists believe. The Oort Cloud is a hypothesized sphere of frozen objects thought to start at about 10,000 AU and extend to 100,000 AU, or 1.5 light years from the Sun.

Nobody expected to find an object like Sedna in the largely empty space between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. Theorists are now scrambling to explain Sedna's presence and what it means to the composition of the outer solar system.

"Sedna could be a member of a substantial population of bodies trapped between the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud," says the University of Hawaii's David Jewitt, who made the first accurate estimate of a KBO albedo in 2001.

Brown, who now bets against finding Planet X in the Kuiper Belt, thinks his group's discovery of Sedna portends an even more compelling scenario. "I'd also be willing to bet that there are many objects larger than Pluto out in the region of space where Sedna lives," Brown said last week. Out to about 1,000 AU, he speculates that there could be 10 or 20 Pluto-sized objects, "and a handful of larger things, too."

Some of these suspected worlds could be as big as Mercury or even Mars, he said. I asked Brown if there might be worlds larger than Pluto clear out at the edge of the Oort Cloud, 1.5 light-years away and nearly half the distance to the Alpha Centauri star system.

"Absolutely," he said. "Probably even likely."

More worlds to discover! More worlds to mine!

Tragedy And Disaster
There's an old Latin American joke cursing their military junta el Presdientes of their world. A child is asked in class, "What is he difference between a tragedy and a disaster?"
The child replies, "A Tragedy is if the plane carrying El Presidente and his whole cabinet and their families crashes into the side of the mountain. A Disaster is when El Presidente survives the crash."

In that spirit, I bring to you this article:

A private jet that was en route to Houston to pick up former President Bush (news
- web sites) clipped a light pole and crashed Monday as it approached Hobby
Airport in thick fog, killing all three people aboard.

The Gulfstream G-1159A jet, coming into Houston, went down about 6:15 a.m. in an undeveloped area 1 1/2 miles south of the airport, officials said. The former president had been scheduled to travel to Ecuador for a conference.

"I was deeply saddened to learn of the plane crash this morning," Bush said through spokesman Tom Frechette. "I'd flown with this group before and know them well. I join in sending heartfelt condolences to each and every member of their families."

The names of the three crew members were not immediately released. Bush, who lives in Houston, was going to give a lecture for the Guayaquil, Ecuador, Chamber of Commerce, Frechette said, adding, "It's very sad." He said he was to have accompanied Bush, as was a Secret Service agent.

It's no big deal in the scheme of the world (or space policy for that matter), but I thought I'd share that disaster with you.

More Inuit References, or How Many Words Do We Really Need (In A Time Of Global Warming)?
Not enough by far.
The Arctic is shrinking as global warming continues. Folks, the Inuit who are famed to have so many different words to describe snow, have no words to describe this because they are seeing has simply not been seen in their part of the world before. Check it out.

We can't even describe what we're seeing," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of
the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (news - web sites) which says it represents 155,000 people in Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia.

In the Inuit language Inuktitut, robins are known just as the "bird with the red breast," she said. Inuit hunters in north Canada recently saw some ducks but have not figured out what species they were, in Inuktitut or any other language.

An eight-nation report this month says the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and that the North Pole could be ice-free in northern hemisphere summer by 2100, threatening indigenous cultures and perhaps wiping out creatures like polar bears.

Then they go on to report this little factoid:

In Arctic Europe, birch trees are gaining ground and Saami reindeer herders are
seeing roe deer or even elk, a forest-dwelling cousin of moose, on former lichen pastures.

"I know about 1,200 words for reindeer -- we classify them by age, sex, color, antlers," said Nils Isak Eira, who manages a herd of 2,000 reindeer in north Norway.
"I know just one word for elk -- 'sarvva'," said 50-year-old Eira. "But the animals are so unusual that many Saami use the Norwegian word 'elg.' When I was a child it was like a mythical creature."

Thrushes have been spotted in Saami areas of the Arctic in winter, apparently too lazy to bother migrating south. Foreign ministers from the eight Arctic countries are due to meet in Reykjavik on Wednesday but are sharply divided about what to do. The United States is most opposed to any drastic new action.

1200 words for Reindeer! One native word for Elk, but they borrow the Norwegian word instead. Times are changing. We are seeing disturbing signs everywhere. A Darkness may as well be rising in the East. I have but one question.
What would Gandalf do? :)

- Art Neuro

Smart One Arrives On The Moon
In what seems like an episode of Astroboy, the European Space Agency's SMART-1 robotic probe has landed on the moon.

More information of the regional lighting conditions will be obtained by SMART-1 for the Moon's north polar region. "The greatest contribution to our understanding of the lighting in this region will likely come from the fact that SMART-1 will image the north pole for at least six months, providing information on the seasonal variations of the lighting conditions in this region," Bussey said.

Although not comprehensive or extensive, Spudis added, Europe's SMART-1 will obtain some new data of great value. It nicely helps to fill the niche on global elemental mapping and the image data makes a small but nonetheless important enhancement to the extensive Clementine image data, he said.

ESA's Foing is delighted that the Moon probe has reached its destination. The spacecraft is ready for action.

"The team is still so excited by SMART-1's first lunar orbit, thanks to the new technologies. We obtained before lunar capture the first European pictures of the lunar North pole and far side,・Foing said. "The spacecraft and the instruments are ready for their lunar tasks: charting lunar minerals, looking at the chemical signature of Earth-Moon violent beginnings, searching for ices at the poles, or prospecting the potential sites for future landing probes and exploration."

The moon is certainly an oft-visited mistress these days. :)

Four years On The International Space Station
We have now had ten crews and four continuous years of habitation on the ISS. Doesn't seem that long ago that they started this thing, but now it's four years gone by. Time flies when you're having fun.

For NASA officials, the anniversary marks the end of a year of firsts for the ISS that included unprecedented repairs and spacewalks for two space station crews.

In February, Expedition 8 commander Michael Foale and flight engineer Alexander Kaleri stepped outside the ISS for the first spacewalk without a human crewmember inside.

A few months later a new station crew, Expedition 9's Gennady Padalka and Michael Fincke, flawlessly performed a risky spacewalk to repair a U.S. ISS component while wearing Russian Orlan space suits and starting from the Russian segment.

"It is a testament that we've learned a lot about adapting to conditions in space," said Mark Geyer, NASA's ISS manager for integration and operations, in a telephone interview.

Humans have lived onboard the ISS since Nov. 2, 2000, when the three-man crew of Expedition 1 set foot inside the orbiting station. "It was a foggy day," Geyer said of Expedition 1's Oct. 31 launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 的t was a long trip to see a three-second launch."

Geyer stressed that while humans have lived continuously aboard the ISS since 2000, they have lived in space much longer. The Russians had a near-continuous presence aboard Mir since 1996.

Still, 4 years is nothing to be sneezed at.

Drew Henson Makes An Appearance For The Cowboys
Bill Parcells finally let the failed Yankee take the field, but only after his main QB Vinny Testaverde got hurt. Henson completed six passes but the Cowboys haplessly went down 30-10 to the Ravens.

Quarterback Drew Henson replaced an ineffective Vinny Testaverde and completed all six of his passes, including the Cowboys' only touchdown, in a 30-10 loss to the Baltimore Ravens. Coach Bill Parcells was quick to point out that Testaverde injured his right shoulder after throwing his second interception, and Parcells refused to anoint Henson the starter against the Chicago Bears on Thursday.

"I don't know what's going to happen," said Parcells, who has so far ignored calls by fans and media for Henson to start. "Let's just see where he is. If I have all the facts, then I'll make a decision."

Henson said he did not feel overwhelmed against the Ravens' defense. As for Thursday, he said, "If I've got to go, I'll be ready. We'll see if Vinny can come back."

It's still nowhere near as fun as baseball, but there you have it. Drew Henson has sort of arrived. If it were a choice between being the Quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys on any given Sunday or the regular Thirdbaseman for the New York Yankees, you know I'd choose the latter. :)

- Art Neuro

A Self-Contradictory Life
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the most successful small arm of the century, the AK47 turned 85 on 10 November.

Kalashnikov is the most poignant symbol of the decline. When the Soviet Union began to crumble in 1989, the legendary gun maker was 70 years old, rich in official honors and titles, but ill prepared for the market forces about to sweep Russia.

Kalashnikov makes nothing from his gun designs. The Soviet Union had licensed more than a dozen countries to manufacture his weapons. After 1991 post-communist middlemen began selling stock out of old Soviet armories, and today there are an estimated 100 million AK-47s in circulation. The rifle is featured on the flags of Mozambique and numerous jihadist groups. Knockoffs are everywhere; General Kalashnikov and Izhmash accused the United States this summer of buying pirate AK-47s for the Iraqi police force. And authentic AK-47s remain dirt cheap. "Militarily, the guys who are buying are poor and they're insurgents and they're just going to buy AK-47s," says Old Dominion University professor and small-arms expert Aaron Karp. "They'd be foolish not to."

So there you have it. Mikhail Kalashnikov goes on to say:

The romance is gone for Kalashnikov. He says he has been very careful about lending his name only to honorable products, but less so about the financial details. "I haven't become a billionaire. I haven't become a millionaire," he says. "And I think it's unlikely I ever will."

In another article, we see:

Kalashnikov said the rifle “was created to defend the fatherland,’’ adding, ”It is a pity it was used in other inadmissible conflicts,“ The New York Times reported.

So what we have here is a man who designed commy-tommy-guns, who wishes that they weren't used to kill people; and an old-time commie who laments he isn't going to be a millionaire or a billionaire.

- Art Neuro

Bureaucratic Planning
"The future is uncertain and The End is always near." So sang the late Jim Morrison in 'Roadhouse Blues'.
I am writing this before I forget this very interesting piece of Australian Film history which was told to me most elaborately and lavishly last Friday night as we celebrated the birthday of one Brain A. Williams.

In the 1970's a certain man I shall refer to as MJ, but not Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson found himself in the crucible of the Australian Film Industry's revival. It was 1975, he was the General Manager and co-founder of the now-legendary Sydney Film Co-operative, who was invited to participate in the 1975 'Australia 75' event in the category of Film and TV.

At one of the meetings, he was regaled to The Plan by a group of fifty-something-year old high ranking bureaucrats in Canberra over a lunch. The Plan, was conceived by Prime Minister John Gorton and Nugget Coombs to resuscitate the Australian Film Industry back in 1968. It was a 3-stage plan, consisting of three decades where Australia would put into effect a concerted plan to develop a film industry and cultural industry. The Plan consisted of a decade of reconstruction, a decade of development and decade of consolidation. Simple enough.

What MJ reports is that when he reflects on his lifetime in the film business, the Plan was indeed carried out and there is nothing surprising in that in of itself, but when you look at the details, the events become striking. In 1971, the Federal government created institutions such as the AFC, and AFTS; invested money to the AFI. In 1981, it introduced the 10BA tax concession which opened the floodgates to investment and in 1981; and in 1991 they moved to create the Film Finance Corporation. What was amazing to MJ was not only the fact that the Plan had succeeded in resuscitating a long-dormant film industry to the point where Hollywood came to shoot in Australia, but the fact the plan had survived successive governments.

The way MJ put it, John Gorton and Nugget Coombs conceived the Plan in 1968; and this was not junked by William McMahon ("He wasn't stupid enough to ditch it", as MJ put it). Gough Whitlam obviously saw no problem in continuing a cultural programme, and neither did Malcolm Fraser and then treasurer John Howard. Hawke and Keating obviously did not abandon the Plan and neither has the current Coalition government. In other words (mine) the Australian Government sustained an Affirmative Long Term Plan (ALTP) for the Film Industry. According to MJ, he has seen signs of 'the Plan' or an ALTP in other areas and sectors of Australian life. There has been an ALTP regarding Welfare, taxation, Micro-economic Reform, and so on. And what is truly amazing about this is that Federal Governments of both Major Parties come and go, but in essence, the policies that get carried out are indeed according to the ALTP.

"Think about that for a moment, the scope of this thing," said MJ. "These people are out there voting on politicians thinking there is a choice, but really there isn't. There's just 'The Plan' for everything and the Federal Government is just moving on it, administering it."
MJ went on to cite all the examples; how Keating was planning to do the same thing as the Howard government of completely dismantling the CES and creating a jobs-placement market. The GST was a bone of contention because he couldn't get it through the Labor Caucus as Option C in 1985 so Keating used it as a political stick for the 1993 election instead but the GST was always going to happen (an observation with which I agree). Floating the dollar, the de-regulation of the banking sector, all of these momentous policy shifts opf the past were executed according to plans drawn up by high level policy planners in the various bureaucracies.
That's right.

According to MJ, the high level policy planners of this country are all working to a Plan that is over-arching all the little issues we see day-to-day. Politics as we digest it in soundbites and TV segments and column inches is all window dressing; Which is entirely believable. We live under the rule not of democracy but a polytechno-oligarchy. Elections are the stuff of popularity contests; sort of a puppet show for the gallery.
- All of which dovetails with the Frank Zappa observation that government is the entertainment branch of industry. Its importance lies in looking important and it's only important because it's important to look important. If you thought baseball was smoke, well, politics is no different it seems. So much for the importance of electoral politics. As for the old Left/Right debates that masquerade as policy setting, well we can all consign those to history as something akin to interesting Broadway Musicals of the past.

And so we came to the end of the 30 year Film Industry Plan in 2001. What did the bureaucrats say about the film industry after the 30year plan to MJ back in 1975?
"They said after that, all bets are off."
I am a film maker in the post-ALTP period of the Australian Film Industry. :)

- Art Neuro

Quantum Astronomy Continued
Here's more in the second instalment.

The First Interplanetary Communication Link
Laser comm links to Mars!

The 5-watt laser NASA plans to test at Mars by the end of the decade is expected to transmit data at rates nearly 10 times faster than any existing interplanetary radio communications link. The difference, NASA officials said, will be comparable to moving from a dial-up modem to a broadband Internet connection.

But the new technology is not without its challenges and NASA says it could be decades before lasers are ready to take over as the primary means of communicating with spacecraft.

The U.S. military has plans to field a constellation of optical communications relay satellites in Earth orbit starting around 2012. Those satellites are intended to help the Pentagon deal with a bandwidth crunch that has been heightened in part by a growing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that are transmitting data-rich imagery.

NASA faces a bandwidth crunch of its own in deep space as more powerful spacecraft and instruments become reality. Highly reliable data links with fast transmission rates also are deemed critical to the human planetary expeditions NASA hopes to undertake. NASA is tackling some of the technical challenges facing interplanetary optical communications with the Mars Laser Communication Demonstration (MLCD) now in development at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

It's like reading some sci-fi novel.

- Art Neuro

The Drew Henson Hour Approacheth
... but it ain't here yet.

"The other player gives us a better chance to win," Parcells said of Vinny Testaverde. "We're not running a tryout camp." Parcells said he didn't consider putting in Henson late in Monday's blowout loss for fear of subjecting him to the safety blitz. He compared Henson, who hasn't taken a snap this season, to a young fighter with only five or six bouts.

"It's not like I wouldn't want to find out about the player," said Parcells, "but right now I don't think it's the time." Parcells said he could spend two hours talking about the reasons he didn't want to play Henson yet, but declined to elaborate.

So we await the Cowboys to sink even further before the futur arrives in Dallas Football Land. So much for that.
Hey, it's a kind of star-gazing, okay?

- Art Neuro

Off The Air - A Quick Update Of The Space Freaks...
We're busy folks., and these are trying times.
Some of us are tyring to finish a thesis and this is tough as hell.
Some of us are trying to finish a film; this is tough business.
Some of us are also trying to finish an album. This is bloody tough when you're tyring to finish a film at the same time.
Some of us are considering launching a proper website to replace this meager blog.
Some of us are trying to write a manifesto of our collective position on Space Policy; and this is not going to be easy.
Some of us have Day-Jobs, some of us are tyring to secure one.
All of this and it's bleeding November!
So while we're off the air a bit, bear with us. :)

Politics In the Age of Scumbags
Everybody has a take on politics. It's the natural process of democracy where everybody's opinions (sad and pathetic as they are/might be) are not stamped out by some ideologue. This is a good thing. In the course of time, people start to get frustrated that they cannot convince others of their 'wisdom'. It may simly be the case that the so-called wisdom is simply a matter of being *wrong*; as in mistaken. In other words, it may all be opinion, but sometimes being wrong is being wrong is being wrong, much like Gertrude Stein's rose.

However, it has to be said that the adage, "politics is the last refuge of the scourndrel" was never more true than today.

People assume I am a political animal - I am not. I am an anti-politicial animal in as much as I try to cut out politics from the issue, as I strongly believe that technological solutions which rest on scientific method are far more likely to be useful than political soutions which rely heavily on people's emotional acceptance of unacceptable things. I know people love to say, what is not political, but I beg to say where philosophers seek the abstract sans the idiotic baggage of metaphsyics, I seek space policy sans the moronic baggage of politics. It may be nigh impossible, but anything would be better than the age old crap.

After all, if we are to get to space, maybe we have to take on the *unpolitic* to achieve the long term success for humanity. The way I figure it, politics, in the guise of Left/Right knuckle dusters and the usual he-said-she-said is about as useful as a spare groom at a wedding. And while both sides are into point-scoring over substantial policies, we have to say, it doth suck.
Folks, we're trying for space; not try and win the local election. We're entirely happy to leave politics to the scumbags, the scurrilous, the scoundrels, the scantily clad, the policy squonks, and the unadulterated scum. Just as long as we get the policies and outcomes we want. :)

In the mean time, 'Stick it to the man. '

- Art Neuro

Daisuke Matsuzaka Drops Major Hint
The Seibu Lions Ace, Daisuke Matsuzaka has dropped his first hint that he won't wait out until he earns his Free Agency in 2008 to try out with the Majors.

If you can read Japanese, here's the article. :)
Essentially he says, "Next year I'm with the Lions, but that's talking just about next year."
The indication seems to be that he would use the posting system to see what bids come over the Pacific Ocean for his services. Matsuzaka's got a 96mph Fastball a Slider, a plus Curve and allegedly, a weird screw-ball like 'gyro-ball'.

Mark my words, the Yankees will be in-like-Flynn on this bubba.

- Art Neuro

Inherit the Wind Redux
In what is another chapter in the on-going legal idiocies that are the monkey trials, the US stae of Georgia is hosting another round of seemingly never ending faith vs. science debates at the tax payer's expense. Get your barf-bags now. :)

The stickers, which appeared after pressure from hundreds of parents, many of them religious conservatives, read:

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

Linwood Gunn, a lawyer for the suburban Atlanta school board, said the stickers only advised students to keep an open mind and did not promote religion in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the school board on behalf of parents who believed the disclaimers pushed the teaching of creationism and discriminated against non-Christians and followers of other religions. Creationism rejects modern scientific explanations for the origin and development of life, preferring instead the idea of supernatural creation by God. Evolution, which is accepted by virtually all biologists, contends life developed from more primitive forms and was dictated by natural selection.

And yet, I still get people who express their 'doubts about evolution' on the grounds that not all the data is in. Seriously folks, how much data do you these people need? Isn't it good enough that Evolution is the equivalent of the Unfiied Field Theory for Biology?

Rover Report
Opportunity sems to remain opportunistic, while Spirit seems lost without any. Or so we are led to believe in this report.

- Art Neuro