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USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!

I think there's a diary up at dKos... yup, here it is.

Lots of links there.  Damn, wish I'd seen that earlier!

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Mission Accomplished: Probe Hits Comet

Yahoo News & Links

ESA TV coverage of Deep Impact

First European images of impact on Comet 9P/Tempel 1

4 July 2005
These are the first pictures of the impact received by European observers of the Deep Impact encounter.

They were taken by the Faulkes Telescope in Maui, Hawaii (Faulkes Telescope North), which was ideally placed to observe the impact which took place around 07:52 CEST on 4 July. These images show impact and the flare growing as material is thrown out from the comet. The plume appears to be brightening the nucleus by a factor of approximately ten.

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Congrats, NASA!

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

From BBC: Astrologer sues Nasa over probe

A Russian astrologer is suing Nasa for crashing a probe into a comet, claiming it has distorted her horoscope.
Marina Bai is seeking $300m (£170m) in damages, saying the probe's impact on Comet Tempel 1 violated her "life and spiritual values".

She had tried to have a Moscow court prevent the experiment from taking place but her action was rejected.

...
Ms Bai, from Moscow, said the Tempel 1 comet held an important place in her family history, as her grandfather wooed her grandmother by showing her the comet.

Her lawyer, Alexander Molokhov, said the case was based on solid legal ground, since Nasa has an office in Russia, located in the premises of the US embassy in Moscow.

When I went to high school (ahem)...awhile back...the schools in California were excellent. And my undergrad college fees were covered by Federal grants...which doesn't happen now (and really makes me mad). But what this shows is the results of now many years of tax cuts for the rich, of "getting government out our lives", of "trickle down" economics (etc., etc.)...except...it ain't trickling down, and hasn't been for quite awhile. This is REAL sad to read...and I think we are seeing the beginnings of the decay of an empire, if this is any indication. (What about investing in the future?)

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

This is absolutely "true." And it's only really half the story. Besides the increase in people who are for all practical purposes "illiterate," there's also been a huge decline in the number of people, especially young people, who could be called "fluent" in reading and writing.

This is a sad old song, often sung these days;  but I'll contribute another chorus.  I work on the campus of a major State University (U of Calif).  I live w/o a car and use bike and city bus to get to work each day, for the last 25 years.  So I ride the University route with the undergrads and the tiny handful of other staff who take the bus (a lousy 6 percent of the total staff, despite the U's provision of free city bus passes to full time staff).

Anyway, while on the bus I often overhear conversations between the students -- since they tend to be rather loud :-)  and consistently over the last 20 years I believe I hear a decline in the working vocabulary and an increase in the number of dispiriting comments I hear.  I hear university students complaining because they are required to write 3 12-page papers in a quarter (we're on the quarterly academic calendar).  I hear them complain because they are assigned a 150-page book to read.  I hear them complaining because a film they had to watch for a class in theatre arts was "over 2 hours long and really slow, and it was black and white."  There are exceptions -- I was once privy to a sparkling discussion among some math/physics kids who had fallen in love with eigenvectors.  But on the whole the language skills of the present generation of university students -- spoken and written -- are below what would have been considered a decent high school level when I was in high school.

I am not alone in this perception.  Several professors I have spoken to are in near-despair because their lower-division classes need (in the words of one angry, aging biologist) "remedial reading".  "They seem to think it's unfair if they have to put any effort in," complained another.  "Their essays are barely coherent," a sociology prof confided in me once;  "it's hard even to know how to grade them."

It's hard to avoid the perception that "something has happened" to either the quality of education or the quality of the brains we're trying to educate.  Again I say that there are magnificent exceptions;  I've seen some very bright, very motivated students.  But the majority seem to be more apathetic, lazy, stupid and lacking in basic literacy than the same mediocre majority was 20 years ago.  And these are the children of the upper-middle class whose parents can afford the U's not-insignificant tuition!  They come by and large from "good" high schools.  Heaven knows what the bankrupt, overcrowded schools of the urban underclass are producing as "high school graduates" these days.

The reason for the decline is unclear to me.  It is easy to blame television, particularly the frenetic, dumbed-down carny sideshow that tv has become;  we might fault video games.  I once heard a 20-something year old girl explaining to her friends how "video games make you smarter," but she had difficulty expressing this point of view with a vocabulary of about 500 words, every other one of which was "like" or "f-ck" :-)  Perhaps intensive involvement with primitive, reaction-based video games from early childhood plays a part.  I remember a finding from the UK that a startling number of infants in pre-school creches were completely lacking in basic speaking skills;  they could comprehend what was said to them but could barely utter.  The conclusion was that these children had been "minded" by a TV instead of an interactive adult, and had never learned to speak.  They knew not one nursery rhyme or children's song.  No one had ever held these children on a lap and played traditional word/learning games with them.  And here we could blame "the working Mum" if we wanted to be simplistic, but I'd take a larger view.  Children have been raised by "working Mums" for many generations, but the decline in literacy is recent.

It's possible, though some will accuse me of wearing the latest fashion in tinfoil, that the chemical stew we have released into our food and water and air is having some kind of neurotoxic effect on a whole generation;  plenty of studies show neurotoxic effects from the panoply of pesticides used in corporate ag, affecting farmers and farmworkers' children and pets most severely.  We don't know what effect lifetime exposure to low-dosage might have.  We don't have a clue about the effects of chronic low-dosage exposure to all the additives, preservatives, colourings, hormones, antibiotics, artificial flavourings etc. in the corporate food diet, or of the astonishingly high sugar consumption of most Americans.  I believe the old story about the Roman upperclass destroying its own intellectual capacity with lead poisoning (from indoor plumbing) is now considered apocryphal, but it's suggestive.  Could we simply be producing a higher and higher proportion of slightly impaired people?

Also we have to factor in the ever-increasing number of children who are kept on psychoactive drugs from childhood through adolescence to "manage behavioural problems."  The long-term effects of these medications are, I think, not well understood.  Alcohol abuse among the undergraduates is also pretty widespread and probably doesn't help their academic performance, though of course drunken student binges are a recurring theme in Western Civ and didn't seem to prevent higher academic performance in prior decades.  Is a puzzlement.  Some people blame a media culture that valorises stupidity and ignorance (with "heroes" like Bill and Ted) and mocks scholarship or intellect;  but the anti-intellectual theme in US film and pop lit, for example, has been with us for decades.

At any rate, academia (or my little part of it) does seem to sense a decline in the quality of our undergraduates, a lack of the most basic skills of reading, writing, comprehension and argument.  The "dumbing down" of America is not, I fear, just some elitist paranoia;  and this story about Toyota seeking a competent workforce is a good illustration of the end-state of the process... a workforce incapable of modern industrial labour.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

I was just looking at iTunes, and one of their new "iTunes essentials" is this barf-inducing thing called "America: Pride" (and "pride" doesn't mean gay pride).

The songs include stuff by Toby Keith (HURL) and Whitney Houston singing the national anthem.

Hmm...will it create jobs? The youth of Switzerland desperately need the government to invest in job creation...

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

Yep, Swiss voters reinforced this policy (even against the government) on several referendums. The greatest victory was the Avanti proposal - when the road-building lobby prepared a proposal to kick-start highway construction through the Alps again, and the government's counter-proposal was actually more of the same, but Swiss voters rejected both.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Light at end of tunnel for subterranean station

I haven't heard to much about it up to now. My guess even if the Bundesrat gives it's okay there will be referendums from environmentalist. It sounds like a fantastic idea. However some mountains are already suffering because of tourism and skiing, so maybe we have to see the feasability study first.

Since knowing the details of this has to do with my job, let me vent professional anger at some rather minor erroneous details.

the Swiss government last week offered its support for a huge new railway station deep below the Alps.

It's not huge at all, it is just a stopping place, like a metro station but longer. It is not its size that makes it expensive - but, as can be gleaned from later parts of the article, the 800m lift and other stuff needed for regular rather than emergency operation (such as: strong air conditioning [it's hot down there], a small railway to take passengers from the lift's upper station 1.5km inside the mountain to the open, extra safety measures).

But most believe that stopping trains to serve a small interest group is hard to justify when spending billions to slash intercity journey times.

The reason railroaders aren't keen of the project, beyond the lack of profitability, is that a train stopping in the middle of a tunnel means less capacity (the next train must start later) and increased danger of collisions. (Due to the already given geometry of the emergency station - its tunnels have already been bored -, the stopping train would also block the track-changing part.)

At Bodio, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, one of the world's biggest boring machines

First, it is two TBMs, not one. As for one of the biggest, may be right if they mean the total length of the tunnel-boring and concrete-pouring and tunnel-fitting parts. But, second, the boring machine itself is comparatively small: the shield is just 8.83m in diameter. Compare it to the 12.33m TBM of a smaller, 10km tunnel on the northern end of the new Gotthard line that was recently put into service, or the 14.87m of the TBM that bored a Groene Hart tunnel on the Amsterdam to Antwerp high-speed railway. Third, the two other TBMs boring the second-from-North section are bigger than those at Bodio in all dimensions (443m long with trailers, 9.58m shild diameter).

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

PP, you comment is totally accurate, nothing I can add to it.

well said...

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

but why is that wrong. Isn't it totally appropriate to go to these things to defend your country's interests first and foremost?

Now, it could be that your country's interests are best defended by building cooperation and trust with other countries, and treating their leaders casually is not the best way to reach that goal, but is this really the case here?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I hope he gets a sunburn.  

I'd rather own books that I don't read than clothes I don't wear." -- Jonathan Safran Foer

Yes, Plutonium Page, like Oui, I was wondering to which arrogant prick you were referring ;-)

He's just reflecting the opinion of the majority of Americans...

If you can try another date, you probabyl should. August in Southern France is hot, crowded and expensive...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Can you start a tour diary, I'll front page it? Thanks!

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes