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Battlestar Galactica, one of the few television series that I watch regularly, finished up with its summer finale tonight. Season two didn't pack quite the same punch as season one did, for the following two reasons: Too many Baltar -...

Check out John Hinderacker's post about our neighbors to the west. Excerpt:Judging from most news reports, you would think that the Republicans are everywhere in retreat, and the increasing radicalism of the Democratic Party is free of any consequences. Every...

Like I said in the post immediately before this one, Thursday nights are my time to relax. So I'm relaxing. And with this post, I'm relaxing a bit on the tight grip I've been trying to keep on the profanity...

NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake

Any good "hard" science fiction fan was capable of making this analysis. Among others, rocketeer Homer Hickham, author and main character of October Sky retired from NASA and wrote a novel titled Back to the Moon in which NASA is given a pretty good black eye for having become moribund with bureaucracy and political correctness.

Latest in this feeling that NASA had lost its direction comes from no less than the NASA chief administrator himself:

The space shuttle and International Space Station ? nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades ? were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. ?It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,? Griffin said. ?We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.?

Reading between the lines, it appears to the Chief that NASA needed more von Braun and less Rube Goldberg in its design philosophy:

Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, ?My opinion is that it was. ? It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.? Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, ?Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.?

Sounds like we finally have a NASA chief worthy of the name after too many bureaucrats, program managers and barely-disguised political hatchetmen, and not nearly enough engineers in the lead. Hopefully now the Congresscritters will give Griffen the support needed to get us back on the road towards the stars. It's absolutely essential if our civilization is to continue to exist and improve itself.

Face to face at last with Captain Nemo's old foe

Attempts have been underway for some time to capture film of the legendary giant squid (star role in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). This has finally been accomplished.

Click on image to enlarge.

Scientists have taken the first photographs of the giant squid in its natural habitat, providing a remarkable glimpse of one of the most mysterious creatures on the planet.

The leviathan has long been a creature of legend. In 1753 the bishop of Bergen, in Norway, referred to one that was big enough to crush the largest man-of-war. It has been, and remains, inspirational to script writers and authors, most famously Jules Verne, who described how giant squid attacked Capt Nemo's submarine Nautilus.

Until now, our only glimpse has been when the creatures have been washed up or are hauled to the surface after becoming entangled in fishing gear. Adults have never been seen in their natural habitat and all the available information on them has been based on dead or dying animals.

A description of how the pictures of the squid were obtained is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, by Dr Tsunemi Kubodera, of the National Science Museum in Tokyo, and Kyoichi Mori, of the Ogaswara Whale Watching Association. They used a digital camera and bait dangling at a depth of about 450 fathoms off the Ogasawara Islands in the north Pacific.

While it has nothing to do with the next SCOTUS appointment, or the next election cycle, it's still interesting.

Foreign Policy is providing this interesting table of countries that have donated money and supplies to the United States for relief efforts for Katrina.America?s friends abroad, and even some of its foes, have responded to the horrific destruction to the...

The Utah State Fair website has some flipping sweet ads staring Napoleon Dynamote and his friend Pedro. Do you see any sasquatches? Hat Tip to Lone Prairie....

With a courage based on the proposition that, if I get it wrong no one will remember, and if I get it right, I can remind everyone that I'm brilliant, I confidently predict that John McCain will be the Republican...

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