Spam this morning:
Subject: Ulysses, Did you know that you can get free movies, software and eigenvalue lumberman trailblaze
Hm, can I get a steak and kidney pie with that? How about a Jacobian?
Trailblazing indeed.
(ObAstronomy link of the day: Good thing they’re trashing the Hubble, eh?
And people still respond to those offers? Could we just round up the spammers and scammers and the people that fall for them, and put them on a gigantic spaceship and send them off?
There are intelligent telephone sanitizers out there. There have to be.
As for the Hubble: Typical thing of the USA, some big public tragedy like 9/11 and we can’t even get a half-decent investigation going without it being interfered with by the White House. But if it’s a big public tragedy like the space shuttle, we will investigate the hell out of it, put blame somewhere, and then announce a big ambitious program that cuts the budget for all the things we’ve been doing. And it is also a knee-jerk reaction, just like the PATRIOT Act was, that’s killing the HST. We don’t dare fly the shuttles up there to service it because it’s too dangerous.
Excuse me, but what? There’s probably a million people in the USA alone that would fight to be first in line if they opened flying that mission to the public. It’s tragic that the shuttle burned in and the crew died, but that’s a risk that every single astronaut knows about when they sign up. If they offered me a mission with a 25% chance of getting home alive, I’d still volunteer.
Dubya was trying to pull a JFK and he failed miserably. The best thing he could do is give NASA the money to do with as they see fit and fire the head guy (who kept responding to budget cuts with “yes sir!” according to someone who used to work at NASA).