A Russian communications satellite in geostationary orbit has apparently taken an “exceptionally rare” meteor impact. The spacecraft’s thermal control system malfunctioned as a result and prompted an attempt by ground controllers to deorbit the spacecraft. Were the satellite to completely fail on station causing the deorbit attempt to be unsuccessful, the residual “space junk” would render a valuable segment of geostationary orbit unusable for re-use for an indeterminate period of time. Available “slots” in the geostationary band are few these days due to high demand.

Don’t think that this is exclusively the Russians’ problem, since many western commercial and military interests vie for slots which are internationally allocated - for military applications, slots are required in view of every location on Earth. For technical reasons (beamwidth and selectivity), geostationary satellites can not be placed at intervals closer than every few degrees. This fact limits the number of satellites that may occupy slots in a thin band of space defined as exactly a specific geostationary distance from the planet and exactly over the equator.

From New Scientist:

Impact suspected for loss of Russian satellite

A Russian communications satellite appears to have been struck by “a sudden external impact”. Its operators say the extent of the damage caused means the satellite will be sent into “space disposal orbit”.

The Russian Satellite Communications Company’s (RSCC) Express-AM11 satellite ran into its trouble at 0341 Moscow time (0041 GMT) on 29 March. Telemetry from the craft indicates that the fluid circuit that is part of the satellite’s thermal control system depressurised very rapidly. Such damage leaves the spacecraft unable to prevent fluctuations in temperature that can cause electronics to fail.

An RSCC statement says that the satellite’s manufacturer, NPO-PM in Krasnoyarsky Krai, Russia, believes the depressurisation was triggered by an external impact on the spacecraft.

Do not forget to set your clocks ahead this weekend.

Why are we doing this?

In the US, DST was used during the first and second world wars to (ostensibly) conserve energy; during WWII it was referred to as “war time.” DST has value in temperate zones where the daylight to darkness ratio changes considerably from summer to winter. This allows for the human sleep/awake cycle to generally align better with darkness/daylight. The intended effect is less energy consumption. There are some critical arguments against this, however.

Prior to 1966, states and localities were allowed their own discretion whether to use DST locally. After that, the US established the Uniform Time Act that mandated the use of DST; states that wanted to be exempt could do so by passing a state law. During President Nixon’s administration the energy crisis prompted the government to extend DST; this, however turned out to be a bad thing; people and kids were going to work and school in the dark during wintertime. The mandate was overturned thereafter.

In 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March and extend to the first Sunday of November, but if no energy savings can be shown from the extension after the U.S. Department of Energy completes a study of impact of the change, Congress may revert back to the schedule set in 1986 after that.

Why do some states and territories not observe DST?

Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa do not observe DST and stay on “standard time” all year. If you’ve ever spent any time in the summer sun in those regions you probably understand why another hour of sunlight might be undesirable.

And don’t get me started on DST management in Indiana.

Meathead, under investigation for fraud, agreed to resign from commission post. I previously posted about the fraud allegations in Still a Meathead - Part IV.

Sacramento Bee: Reiner resigns from agency

Actor-director Rob Reiner resigned Wednesday as chairman of the California Children and Families Commission following months of controversy over whether the state agency improperly spent $23 million of public money on advertising that benefited the campaign for Reiner’s universal preschool initiative.

[read more]

Unfortunately, Governor Schwarzenegger filled Meathead’s post with Hector Ramirez who is held in high regard by the racist organization La Raza.

Schwarzenegger on Wednesday appointed a replacement for Reiner: Hector Ramirez, vice president of Para Los Niños, a Los Angeles-based children’s charity. Ramirez, who is on record supporting Reiner’s ballot measure, said he would run the agency as an “apolitical organization.”

Though Reiner announced the campaign for Proposition 82 at a press conference at a Para Los Niños preschool in Los Angeles last year, Ramirez said his organization has not taken an official position. He said he would have no involvement in any position on the measure that the board of Para Los Niños decides to take.

However, Ramirez has personally endorsed the measure. A September 2005 press release issued by the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group, quoted him as saying, “The ‘Preschool for All Act’ is the first step to make quality preschool a reality for all children.”

One more point: proposition 82 benefits will be paid for by raising taxes for “the very wealthy.” What this really means is that California will continue to drive small business and high-bracket taxpayers from the state.

Californians, vote NO on proposition 82!

Read my earlier posts on Meathead:
Still a Meathead - Part IV
Still a Meathead
Give Your Children to Us - Now
Rob Reiner Admits he’s a “Meathead”

NASA Shared this video of the solar eclipse today from Turkey. Check it out!

NASA Shares Solar Eclipse With the World
NASA gave people a front row seat to today’s total solar eclipse, thanks to a partnership with the University of California at Berkeley and the Exploratorium. A streaming webcast brought the eclipse — visible along a path from South America to Africa to Asia — to schools and museums and computer desktops worldwide.

VIEW ECLIPSE VIDEOS: + Windows | + Real

The eclipse coverage was part of Sun-Earth Day, celebrated every year to help everyone better understand how our sun interacts with the Earth and other planets in the solar system. This year’s theme, “Eclipse: In a Different Light” shows how eclipses have inspired people to observe and understand the Sun-Earth-Moon system.

With spring approaching, flowers are in bloom, the mocking birds sing all night long and the alligators come out in Machado Park.

Reggie: Part II is expected to open at lake in April

The original Alligator Tale of Harbor City had quite a cast of characters, including Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin. The sequel is shaping up nicely.

Rise and shine.

It’s spring. The sun is shining and temperatures are climbing. The days are growing longer.

Can Reggie’s reawakening be far behind?

Harbor City’s elusive alligator hasn’t been seen since October, when a reptile’s normal winter hibernating season begins.

But Russ Smith, reptile curator for the Los Angeles Zoo, says the South Bay’s favorite watery beast should be stirring back to life any time now in Machado Lake, where he’s eluded capture since August after he was allegedly released illegally over the summer by his owners.

“It’s going to be soon,” Smith said of the alligator’s expected resurfacing. “I still think March would be a good possibility, but I imagine the (recent) cold weather probably pushed things back a little bit. It will probably be April now.”

[read more]

Previous articles on Reggie:

• Alligators in the Sewers - Still!
• Alligators in the Sewers, Part IV (Includes a bit about Steve Irwin dangling his son over a ‘gator).
• Alligators in the Sewers, Part V

Also for your amusement: Reggie not ready for close-up.

The Great Robot Race will air on NOVA Tuesday Night (March 28, 2005). If you can’t watch it then, it will be available on-line Wednesday. Not only are Aerospace concerns competing for DoD DARPA funds, but some scrappy smaller outfits will be involved. Team entrants named “Sandstorm” and “Ghostrider” and 10 others will race across the Mojave Desert to prove their viability as robotic ground vehicles. Speed isn’t the main objective for the DARPA award.

NOVA’s ‘The Great Robot Race’ airs Tuesday

Join NOVA for an exclusive backstage pass to the DARPA Grand Challenge—a raucous race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the Pentagon, which awards a $2 million purse to the winning team. Armed with artificial intelligence, laser-guided vision, GPS navigation, and 3-D mapping systems, the contenders are some of the world’s most advanced robots. Yet even their formidable technology and mechanical prowess may not be enough to overcome the grueling 130-mile course through Nevada’s desert terrain. From concept to construction to the final competition, “The Great Robot Race” delivers the absorbing inside story of clever engineers and their unyielding drive to create a champion, capturing the only aerial footage that exists of the Grand Challenge.

Image: Some of the Robots entered in the race. NOVA

World Climate Report takes on the non-scientific hype being put out by climatological extremists in this very good article:

World Climate Report » No News is Bad News

There is not much new in a collection of articles about global warming and sea level rise in the latest issue of Science. As such, it is mostly recycled and repackaged information that the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Donald Kennedy, can take down from New York Avenue in DC to Capitol Hill, to scare politicians into doing what it wants, which is an immediate cap on U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide.

Never mind that even a 25% reduction will have an undetectable effect on the rate of global temperature rise in the foreseeable future, and that it will cost a lot. Science crammed its March 24th issue with five articles (including commentary and editorials) devoted to melting ice and sea level rise—including one (Overpeck et al., 2006) which proclaims “[I]t is highly likely that the ice sheet changes described in this paper [leading to an—egad—global sea level a rise of 12-18 feet] could be avoided if humans were to significantly reduce emissions early in the current century” is hardly surprising.

[read more]

We took a drive down the coast today on a nice day. We took a walk out on the beach at Seal Beach where I snapped this photo of a pink iceplant blooming on the sand.

I have to admit to having been a Buck Owens fan at one time. I still have a Buck Owens and the Buckaroos CD which replaced my scratched up and worn out LP album. One of my favorites was “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” in 1962 when I was an air crew radioman in the U.S. Navy. Rest well, Buck.

Here’s an excerpt from Owens’ bio from WikiPedia.

Buck Owens

Alvis Edgar Owens, Jr., (August 12, 1929 - March 25, 2006) was an American country music singer widely credited with helping to create the gritty “Bakersfield sound”.

Image: Buck Owens and the Buckaroos — circa 1962 Album Photo

Owens was named the most promising country and western singer of 1960 by Billboard, and his top-10 duets with Rose Maddox in 1961 earned them a nod as vocal team of the year in DJ polls. But it was in 1963, after updating his sound again, that Owens’ career went ballistic. He moved away from the traditional country shuffle to a more upbeat, driving style (”…like a freight train coming through your livingroom,” as Buck said) with the single “You’re For Me” in late 1962. A few months later, “Act Naturally” became his first No. 1 hit. It was rock ‘n’ roll with a country feel. The Beatles later covered it without changing much of anything. It crossed over to the pop charts, and it began an astonishing run: for the next four years, every Buck Owens single went to No. 1. Fifteen in a row. At one point, he had a B-side, “My Heart Skips a Beat,” alternating in the top spot with its A-side, “Together Again.” “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” the follow-up to “Act Naturally,” was No. 1 for 16 weeks. He even sent an instrumental — the signature “Buckaroo” — to No. 1. The streak finally ended in October 1967 when his tribute to his fans, “It Takes People Like You (To Make People Like Me),” underachieved, stopping at No. 2. The next single, “How Long Will My Baby Be Gone,” went to No. 1, as did three more songs in 1969.

We’re adding a second inductee in as many days to the Star Whores Hall of Shame; actor Charlie Sheen.

Sheen, who comes by his delusional fear of government honestly (son of Martin Sheen, activist, moonbat), says he believes that someone in the US Government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, to wit: “it looked like a controlled demolition when the towers came down.” Sheen goes on to imply that 19 terrorists were amateurs with box cutters and unlikely to take out 3 out of 4 objectives without inside help.

Pardon my skepticism, but what a crock of unmitigated feces . . .

Wikipedia has this additional information about Sheen:

Charlie Sheen

September 11th

Sheen declared on the March 20, 2006 broadcast of the Alex Jones radio show that he doesn’t believe the official government story about September 11th.

This event was covered by CNN in what Alex described as a “Balanced Piece”. [The] New York Post and the Boston Herald also covered this, in what Alex described as a [sic] “hit pieces that seek to smear Sheen as an unstable crackpot”.

The same day, March 20th, Google censored the information by not adding indexing to articles reporting on the issue, the search string “Actor Charlie Sheen Questions Official 9/11 Story” returning no hits three days after the story broke out for the first time. The index was added after a three days, while Alex Jones was talking about the Google issue on his radio show. On the 24th, Google gave 17,300 hits on that same search string.

Private life

Sheen has been dogged by trouble, including drugs and a shooting, and he has frequently had problems with the police. Though he was involved with a number of Hollywood personalities, his long-term relationship with adult actress Ginger Lynn in the late 1990s garnered the most media attention. In 1993, his name was found among Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss‘ list of her most frequent customers, and it was revealed that Sheen hired top-class prostitutes and spent huge amounts on escort agencies. During this time, he also had a serious cocaine addiction.

Sheen was married to Donna Peele from September 3, 1995 to November 19, 1996. He then married another actress, Denise Richards, on June 15, 2002. They had two daughters, Sam J. Estevez (born March 9, 2004), and Lola Rose Estevez (born June 1, 2005). In March 2005, Richards filed for divorce, but the couple were able to reconcile briefly afterwards. In January 2006, Richards continued with the divorce.

That bit about Google supressing the story is interesting and further implicates the software giant as a hard-left media outlet of the new kind. But I digress . . .

Summarizing, Sheen has the “feeling” that there was a conspiracy to inflict the 9/11 attacks on the US from within. When we listened to the tape of the Alex Jones interview, it was clearly the ravings of a bipolar, psychotic, cocaine-tooting, narcissistic sex maniac and not any sort of clear, rational deduction or reasoning. The man is a degenerate, and a second-generation one no less. Sheen seems to be an over-privileged loose cannon, either with serious psychological problems, or bent on spreading the sort of political manure for which the left is so infamous.

Nonetheless, we welcome Charlie Sheen to the “hocus-pocus psychosis” exhibit of the Star Whores Hall of Shame.

While appearing on Bill Maher’s show, this creep had the following to say about our military men and women:

According to actor and comedian Richard Belzer, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are too uneducated to be expressing support for the U.S. military mission since they’re just “19 and 20-year-old kids who couldn’t get a job” and “they don’t read twenty newspapers a day.”

You can read the entire article here.

Now, I don’t want to appear uneducated about who’s who in TV Land, but I never heard of this buttugly actor (looks like a cross between Helen Thomas and Ramsey Clark) before he shot off his big mouth on Maher’s show. The article refers to this degenerate as a “comedian” - “commodian” is more like it, given his crappy foul-mouthed way of describing the finest men and women in uniform anywhere. He implies that he “reads twenty newspapers a day.” It’s no surprise this idiot is misinformed if he reads the unsuitable-for-wrapping-garbage LA/NY Times or Washington (com)Post. Hopefully this degenerate, intellectually-challenged weirdo will disappear into obscurity save for his induction into our SWHOS.

Welcome Richard Belzer to the “bad genetics” exhibit in the Star Whores Hall of Shame.

Hat tip Blackfive

Completely unedited, the photo below seems to make the vertical fin on Air Force One look almost invisible! What’s going on?

Right: View of the vertical stabilizer from the first level.

I took this photo from behind the famous aircraft on the 3rd mezzanine level of the Air Force One Pavilion in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library when I noticed the unusual reflection pattern on the glossy surface of the rudder and vertical stabilizer. I knew immediately that I had a great shot! The lighting angles and the highly-polished surface of the airfoil rendered this intriguing optical illusion of near-invisibility.

Photo © 19 MAR 2006 by Damsel. Canon Digital Rebel EOS camera. Permission to publish is given provided credit and a link is given to Cap’n Bob and the Damsel

Update: Fix4RSO linked with “The Great Disappearing Air Force One Trick!“