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Boy, am I glad that I fixed my bike. Ninety percent of the pipeline capacity for the South-Eastern US is down right now. We’re car-pooling with the TDI for now. Here is the press release from the Gov-man’s office:

STATEMENT GIVEN TODAY BY GOV. EASLEY CONCERNING GASOLINE SUPPLY IN NORTH CAROLINA

THE TWO MAJOR PIPELINES THAT FURNISH GASOLINE TO MANY STATES, INCLUDING NORTH CAROLINA, HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY HURRICANE KATRINA AND ARE CURRENTLY WITHOUT ELECTRICITY. THEY SERVICE NORTH CAROLINA AND 8-10 OTHER STATES.

90 PERCENT OF OUR GAS COMES FROM THESE PIPELINES AND RIGHT NOW THEY ARE NOT OPERATIONAL.

SUPPLIERS GENERALLY HAVE A WEEK OR SO OF SUPPLY. THEY HAVE BEEN SHUT DOWN SINCE THE HURRICANE.

THE PIPELINES NEED ELECTRIC SUPPLY AND THE REFINERIES THAT PRODUCE GASOLINE NEED TO MAKE URGENT REPAIRS ALSO ARE WITHOUT ELECTRICITY. THE REFINERIES THAT PRODUCE GASOLINE NEED TO MAKE URGENT REPAIRS.

CONSEQUENTLY, WE DO NOT KNOW THE EXTENT OF THE PROBLEM, BUT WE DO KNOW THAT THERE WILL BE A SIGNIFCANT LOSS OF GASOLINE IN THE SOUTHEAST, AT LEAST IN THE SHORT TERM UNTIL THE ELECTRICITY IS RESTORED.

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… and the president is on vacation. Maybe he is working on finishing My Pet Goat? Apparently he never read the FEMA reports on the probability of the second most devastating disaster to hit the US during his presidency:

In 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked a major hurricane strike on New Orleans as “among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country,” directly behind a terrorist strike on New York City.
Progress Report 8/30/2005

Instead of taking this threat seriously, the administration cut the budget of the New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million two months ago and rolled back wetland protection laws, although wetlands provide important flood buffers around New Orleans. And one in three National Guardsmen in Louisiana is currently in Iraq, and thus not in a position to help protect or rebuild his home state.

All we can do now, is try to help pick up the pieces.

Creationism is religion and has no place in the classroom. End of story. One problem with scientists is that they want to argue with anyone over anything. So they fall into this trap the creationists set for them to consider “intelligent design” a scientific theory and argue painstakingly over creationism’s scientific merit.

However, the “intelligent design” debate is an Orwellian trap. Most people want simple answers. Evolution is not simple, and scientific arguments are nit-picking gobbledygook to most of us not-so-scientific worker-bees. The creationist “theory” is simple and compelling to many who are tired of the complexities of life on earth: “There is the Big Guy - trust me - and He made it all up and said it was good. Amen.”

Uh - that’s not science. That’s religion. Creationists don’t bother to explain where the Big Guy came from and how He got so smart He could make all this stuff up. I mean, if that’s a scientific theory, than we also have to consider the Norse creation myth or the creation myth of the Huron (check it out) or the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines as competing scientific theories. Some of these creation myths are very cool stories - compelling ways of our forebears to explain where we come from. But there is no science in these stories, and neither is in the Christian creation myth.

Today we know that we were designed by an unintelligent process of natural selection - unintelligent design, if you will - and we call this process evolution. This is no more a theory than the globe-shape of the earth is a theory. Evolution is a very broad scientific principle that leaves plenty of room for change, debate and arguments. But there is no room for creationism. Creationism belongs in the church.

The Christian creation myth is not so totally incompatible with evolution as the creationist zealots make it seem, anyway. Many Christians I know have no problem with the idea that God got the ball rolling and created the rules that apply in our world. These Christians praise the Lord for creating such a clever, efficient and effective design as unintelligent design, or evolution.

Religious so-called leaders calling for terror against other nations? Not exactly an original concept! Does Pat Robertson aspire to be the Christian Osama Bin Laden? In a Aug. 22 broadcast on cable television, the wealthy American televangelist called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez:

You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.
Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, Aug. 22, 2005

In the past, Robertson has enjoyed the company and association of bloody dictators and terrorists, like Liberia’s Charles Taylor (BBC) and Zaire’s Mobuto Sese Seko. Robertson’s mining companies did business with these ruthless dictators, extracting blood diamonds and gold from the African soil, fuelling bloody conflicts, cruel oppression and fattening Robertson’s bank accounts. Now Robertson is whining about Chavez, a popular leader among the working class in Venezuela, who has been attacked by US-backed smear campaigns by Venezuela’s rich land-owners. Probably Chavez is not so accommodating to Robertson’s attempts to exploit his country? Greg Palast has more …

Pope Panzerfaust rolled into Köln today, threw his scull cap into the cheering mob and slid down the handrail of the gangway. No, he did not kiss the ground - he’s doing the ecclesiastical slide! Yeah, he’s now da man! Check out all the young Christians, screaming and fainting, when they catch a glimpse of the pope-man. You think the chicks are crazy about Mister P.? Take a look at the some of the guys ;) …

Yeah, he’s the man to stem the tide of young people fleeing the catholic church. Just look at him, a trust-inspiring father-figure, yet hip and edgy, not afraid to rock the boat, ruffle some feathers, shake some booty … The grand-inquisitor-turned-grand-inspirator is here: “Let Christ surprise you.” What a message! Yeah, baby, we looove surprises. What a man!

(hilarious pope-photoshop job via ProfessorBainbridge.com)

A toast to the efforts of Sean Wilson and Julie Bradford and all supporters of the Pop the Cap effort here in North Carolina. This weekend the NC Governor Mike Easley signed House Bill 392 into law. It is now on the books as S.L. 2005-277 and it raises the cap on alcohol content for beer from a measly 6 percent to 15 percent alcohol by volume. This change makes hundreds of fine brews available to beer connoisseurs in North Carolina.

Congratulations to North Carolina on another step into the 21st Century. It didn’t hurt, did it? Keep on going, and maybe this great state, too, will one day have both feet solidly this side of the turn of the century.

Early in the morning on August 13, 1961, workers began tearing up the cobblestone and asphalt along the sector boundaries across Berlin. They began erecting concrete pillars and barbed-wire barricades, while units of the the Volkspolizei - the People’s Police - kept the angry people in the eastern sector in check with machine guns.

The residents of West Berlin watched these events with shocked disbelief. The mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, ordered an emergency session of the West Berlin City Senate and issued an appeal to the international community to stop the division of their city and country by the Stalinists. The government of West Germany in Bonn, under then-chancellor Adenauer, appealed to the West-Germans to stay calm and not to provoke any incidents.

For the East German Stalinist government under Walter Ulbricht, sealing off West Berlin was the final effort to stop the exodus of farmers and workers from the “Farmer’s and Worker’s State.” In the preceding months they had fortified the border between the two German states. As they began surrounding West Berlin with barbed wire, they were plugging the last hole through which thousands of people fled to the West every day. The 24 hours preceding the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall, 2,400 people had registered in the refugee camp in Berlin -Marienfelde alone. Up to that day, almost 2.5 million people had fled the Stalinist regime in East Germany.

The fortified border between East and West Germany, including the Wall surrounding Berlin, cost the lives of hundreds of people in the next 28 years. On November 9, 1989, the East German government started opening the border and allowing some travel of East Germans to the West. In the next two days, thousands of East Germans rushed to the border, and in West Berlin some started applying sledgehammers to the concrete barriers. On November 11, the first concrete segment of the Wall fell, and the border posts were overrun by East Germans. This was the end of the Wall, and the beginning of the end of the divided Germany.

[Source: Chronik der Mauer (in Geman)]

… are much cheaper than people. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is projected to cost a total of $686 million over 6 years, according to this year’s NASA budget (PDF - see page 320). This is roughly half of a single launch of the space shuttle but the MRO is designed to send back a torrent of scientific data about Mars. Yet, there is still this silly obsession with putting humans on Mars.

To contribute to the four science goals, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has the following science objectives:
1. Characterize the present climate of Mars and its physical mechanisms of seasonal and interannual climate change
2. Determine the nature of complex layered terrain on Mars and identify water-related landforms
3. Search for sites showing evidence of aqueous and/or hydrothermal activity
4. Identify and characterize sites with the highest potential for landed science and sample return by future Mars missions
5. Return scientific data from Mars landed craft during a relay phase
MRO Objectives

Humans on Mars? What for? What can humans do on Mars that a well-designed robot cannot do? Seems that the challenges of putting humans into space has the potential to interfere with actual science, because it uses up so much more resources (=taxpayer dollars). Especially at times of tight budgets, manned space flight is a luxury, maybe even a vanity, we cannot afford.

Seit 1. August gilt jetzt also die neus Rechtschreibung - fast überall. Da dachte ich mir dass ich mir das mal genauer anschaue muss. Über Jahre war das ja ein Riesentheater und ich war also auf ein paar Überraschungenn gefasst. Die Überraschung war dann allerdings dass die sogenannte “Neue Rechtschreibung” tatsächlich nur eine handvoll Änderungen beinhaltet, die im Großen un Ganzen sinnvoll sind. Da werden doch nur ein paar Ungereimtheiten in der Deutschen Grammatik ausgebügelt, aber wie so oft im Leben werden Dinge die eigentlich gar keinen Unterschied machen zum Riesendrama.

Es spielt doch überhaupt eine Rolle ob man nun Kuss oder Kuß schreibt - solange sich nur alle einig sind was richtig ist. Das Einzige was noch viel lächerlicher ist als großspurig eine “Rechtschreibereform” zu verkünden ist wenn sich einzelne Bundesländer querlegen und mit dem Fuß stampfen und ganz trotzig sagen “Meine Suppe ess ich nicht!”

Na ja - wie dem auch sei. Auf der nächsten Seite sind die neuen Regeln …
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Congratulations to NASA - the space shuttle is back in one piece. Now it’s time to put those big clunkers in a nice museum and charge foreign tourists money to see them (I think that US taxpayers have already paid their admission fees).

At an average cost of $1.3 billion per launch, and a total cost of $174 billion, the space shuttle program seems like a giant welfare program for the aerospace industry. What exactly are they doing up there? This time, it seems they put the craft into orbit in order to see if they could repair it!? In the past, sometimes we’d hear about the astronauts fixing stuff, like the space telescope, or tinkering with the space station. Mostly it is just about this irrational idea that we have to put humans into space.

As a taxpayer, however, I get much more scientific ROI from unmanned space exploration, where robots are strapped on a rocket and blasted to cool places, like Mars or Jupiter. These missions are low-risk, reasonably priced and seem to yield concrete scientific results. The Mars Pathfinder cost a moderate $150 million and gave us a great view and concrete data from the surface of Mars.

It’s not like I am not fascinated by the idea of space travel. But the space shuttle program is wasting my taxes on a system with some pretty significant flaws. This is one area, where I think that private enterprise makes a lot more sense than government programs. and once they figure out how to get people safely into space and back - sign me up, Scottie!