Winter hangs tough in the North Country

It's snowing up here, again.  And I was going to do some more lawn work.  Guess I'll wait til the snow stops.

"Revered institution"

Used by an NPR radio commentator about the Secret Service.  I wonder what planet that reporter comes from.  The Secret Service used to be thought of as competent and brave, but not revered.  The US Marine Corps is a revered institution,  the Secret Service is merely OK.

NASA. Lost in Space

Or somewhere.  Having phased out the Space Shuttle and flown surviving orbiters off to museums, NASA finds that we have no way to get astronauts up to the International Space Station.   NASA is buying tickets to the ISS from the Russians, at $20 million a seat. 
   Sometime we ought to have our own transportation into space.  We have two good booster rockets, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and  the United Launch Association's Atlas 5.  Both rockets are real,  have flown many missions, and have plenty of power to boost a minivan load of astronauts up to the ISS.  But NASA and Congress (Senators Kay Bailey Hutchenson and Richard Shelby)  are "investing" in yet a third rocket booster, the "Space Launch Vehicle" (SLS).
   This is a black hole money sink.  The SLS offers nothing that the existing Falcon and Atlas boosters don't already have.  But a new rocket will require dozens of test flights and years of fiddling around.  A rocket is made up of a zillion parts, all of which get really stressed hard during flight.  Despite the best efforts of the engineers,  a few of those zillion parts will break and the rocket will be destroyed.  Only after figuring out what broke after each rocket failure, and beefing it up,  for the next flight, can we then find the next part that will break under load.  By experience, we know that it takes 20-40 disasters, before a good flight is achieved. 
   Falcon and Atlas have aready gone thru all this pain, the weak spots have been found and fixed, and both of them fly dependably now.  That cost a lot of money.  Now that we have two working boosters, NASA should use them. 
   Instead, NASA pushed by a pork loving Congress, and full of the good old Not-Invented-Here syndrome is pouring taxpayer money into an unneeded third booster.  The same money would move more cargo  using existing boosters.
  Then we have the same trick going on with crew capsules.  SpaceX has already flown their Dragon capsule and NASA wanted to fund private development of a second capsule.  Instead, Congress wants NASA to develop inhouse the "Orion" capsule.   Again NASA ought to use the existing flight tested Dragon capsule just because it's ready and it works. 
  Granted, capsule development ain't as hard as booster development.  Boosters have to handle tons of explosive cyrogenic fuels, withstand  fierce thrust, and provide perfect autopilot performance.  If anything goes wrong the explosion is in the kilotons of yield range.  Capsules just have to hold air, and hang onto their heat shield.  Much easier engineering proposition. 
   Want to bet some gutsy contractor would be able to fly astronauts to the ISS right now, using an existing booster and the existing capsule?  And do it for less than the Russki's are charging for a SINGLE astronaut flown to the ISS?  All it would take is some funding. 

Ivanhoe

It started out as a best seller historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, written in the early 19th century.  I encountered the tale as a Hollywood movie starring Taylor and Taylor as a small child.  Robert Taylor, tall dark and handsome, played Ivanhoe and the much more famous Elizabeth Taylor played Rebecca of York, the "other" love interest in the story, completely eclipsing who ever it was who played Rowena, the Saxon heiress.  The movie had jousting, fighting, siege of a castle by Robin Hood, and a climatic final trial by arms on horseback between Ivanhoe and Bois Gilbert, to save Rebecca from a capital charge of witchcraft.  The movie made a vivid impression, and although I didn't see it again until the dawn of the VCR age, I remembered every scene, and most of the dialog.
   Many years later the BBC did their own Ivanhoe.  It was longer, (two DVDs instead of one) and much more sophisticated than the Hollywood costume drama from long ago.  Naturally as a died in the wool fan I rented it from Netflix and watched it.  Interesting.  First thing I noticed is that the BBC version demanded very close attention to follow the story at all.  All the characters dressed about the same, in gray and brown, and the men all hid behind  flowing full beards making it hard for the viewer to tell one character from another. The women wore no makeup, and were nowhere near as pretty as the Hollywood actresses.  Technicolor it was not, the film was processed by one of those arty labs that specializes in turning color into black and white.  At least the camera man used a tripod to steady the camera, and the sound man made the dialog audible over the score.
   I think Hollywood did a better movie than the BBC.
 

Mistresses now a Federal Offense

The trial of John Edwards starts today.  Edwards is accused of having a mistress and paying serious money to keep her comfortable and discrete.   Don't get me wrong, Edwards is a sleaseball, taking up a mistress while his wife is dying of cancer, and doing all this while running for President of the US.
  But, used to be, sleaseballs merely got bad press and shunned by society.  Now it's a federal offense with serious jail time.  I'm so glad we had all that campaign finance reform to allow the feds to prosecute politicians for keeping mistresses.

NPR dislikes Amazon

Still listening to the car radio. Long piece on NPR about how Amazon is destroying the publishing business.  Some discussion of the Justice Dept suit against Apple and the big publishers alleging price fixing.   The NPR speaker claimed that Justice was handing the book business over to Amazon.  More unclarity followed.
    NPR claimed that the average literary fiction book only sold 200 copies a YEAR.  Wow.  Even at $30 a copy, that's only $6000 in sales, not enough to pay for setting type.  Apparently genre fiction, romances, science fiction, westerns, and adventure novels are doing much better than "literary fiction".  Could it be that  "literary fiction" is boring stories about loser protagonists?  I haven't bothered to read "literary fiction" since Hemingway died, and that was a long time ago. 
   Could it be that the old line publishing houses, all bought up and merged by a bunch of suits, simply can no longer find and print worthwhile new authors?  I'm thinking of  Tom Clancy, writer of a dozen best sellers, who had to go to the Naval Institute Press to get his "Hunt for Red October" published.  None of the regular publishers had the brains to snap up this promising new author and publish his book.  Could it be that Amazon can undercut all the old line publishing houses, which don't seem to be able to do anything except print books from their old line of established authors? 

Does the FDA have to approve EVERYTHING?

Listening to NPR on the car radio today.  A medical guy was describing an off the wall procedure which had worked well in some cases.  It did not involve the use of commercially marketed drugs at all.  But, the voice over commentator at the end of the piece said something like "This innovative procedure won't go anywhere until the FDA approves it."  
   Excuse me.  I thought a license to practice medicine granted to the right to treat patients.  In this case the treatment worked.  I fail to see where the FDA has any authority to approve , disapprove, or demand more paperwork on a procedure that does not involve prescribing any sort of drug.