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Continuing with the car metaphor, I believe, until we get past the more utilaterian stage (say Model T), it will be a while before we can get in the Italian designers for our nice sleek Ferraris...

Anyway, most engineers still believe in function over form.

Yes ...

A Soviet-era, inactive, grenade was found ~100 feet from the stage (which was behind bullet-proof glass) It is not clear whether it was found or thrown. W was in no way in danger.

The big fuss is because the Georgian government only told the Secret Service of the incident about 2 hours after.

Someone once said that the universe is both stranger than we think, and stranger than we can think ...

Sagan I think. Or Clarke.

Speaking of things glowing brighter than the galaxy - I remember Nova mentioning that gamma ray burst of that magnitude happens fairly regularly (in astronomical terms) - except no one has quite yet figured out why...

Hey, Cindi -

Intriguing article. I wonder how this new observation will impact origin theories (Big Bang) and theories on black holes ...

4,000 light year pocket of anti-matter ... wow.

<Shakes head>

Daniel

Well, my two cents:

I've read all three books of the tri-color, as well as "The years of rice and salt"

The trilogies, in my opinion, were great ... KSR used several different themes - science, religion, terraforming, economics, conservation and politics - and weaved them together in a rivetting tale. If any of these elements were left out, the story would have been the lesser for it.

As for "Years", well, it really over-abused the concept re-incarnation. Good idea, poor execution.

Shikata ga nai ...

ok ... lets see if I can explain this ...

The researchers where drawing comparisons between the astronomical black-holes (that result from gravitational collapse of matter) and a quark-gluon plasma http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 … ng.html](a state of matter that existed shortly after the big bang)

When both of these are expressed in ten dimensions using string theory, they are similar in structure and may have similar characteristics - que all the fluff about evaporating black holes, bacteria et al in the article.

The article is not very consistent in the usage of the term "black hole", using it to refer to both the "standard" gravitational black holes, and the "mathematical" black hole structure shared between the former and a quark-gluon plasma.

Just noticed this link on projectconstellation.us, courtesy of Pravda -

http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/ … tml]Russia flies to Mars in 2014, USA's Martian mission slated for 2030

Personally, I think, this should be read with a couple grains of salt ...

Until we find a cheap / easy way to get of this rock, military space technology and space science technology will to a large extend be similiar (that was my point)... do I need to point out who launched Clementine ... it wasn't NASA.

I guess they changed that - the programme I watched mentioned that it used compressed gas.

I remember seeing this on a Discovery Channel programme a while back. I always wondered why NASA could not adapt this 'bot for shuttle in-space inspections.

There's a saying about economics - every economist has a theory, and none of them are wrong (or something like that anyway ...)

Speaking off capitalism v socialism in the context of a single, small initial settlement just does not make sense. The production of goods and services will form a very insignificant portion of the initial settlement, especially if that settlement is largely supported by the off-world (Earth) economies.

Only once you have larger or multiple settlements will this become a question - and even then, IMHO, it will (initially) resemble more of a barter economy than either socialism or capitalism.

Either way - there are few pure socialist states left on Earth - the scandinavian countries referred to all have mixed economies - somewhere in between pure socialism and laisez faire capitalism.

During the boycott of South Africa in the 70's / 80's the white apartheid government instituted a programme to convert coal into oil (and other chemical products). Today, a large percentage of petroleum sold in South Africa is extracted using this process. http://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/fro … id=1]Sasol is the only industrial facility in the world to produce petrochemicals from coal.

Ironically, SA "traded" the technology to France to obtain nuclear technology to build a nuclear power plant close to Cape Town ... and for a short while, nuclear weapons. Geopolitics