NASA Cojones award

It's kind of pathetic if you have your wife plead for your job in public. This goes double, if you're Mike Griffin, NASA chief administrator. It would help, of course, if Mike Griffin wasn't uncooperative with the incoming administration.

It seems to me, though, that there's one thing that Mike Griffin doesn't understand, which is that President-elect Obama is truly serious about supporting NASA's big picture mission, and fully promoting their scientific missions and activities, unlike the Bush administration, which seemed to me to have a truly sectarian agenda. What this means, in practice, is an overall increase in actual activity, possibly at the expense of big ticket/flashy programs, such as Ares I.

What is guaranteed, with the incoming administration, is that intelligent questions will be asked, and that consequently NASA will need a good man at the top. It's unlikely he'll change his attitude, and cultivate a little humility, which is a shame because Griffin is clearly qualified at the technical level. With a truly cooperative disposition, such a person could clearly help define a coherent and meaningful strategy for NASA over the next 8 years, in association with the new administration, which would commit fully to the new direction.

And that's important, because a strong civilian NASA is critical to the economic well being, and technical leadership of this country, and would provide a true and meaningful alternative to defense spending. To me, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were inspirational to a generation of engineers, and directly responsible in large part, to the US developing and gaining an overall technological superiority that wasn't ceded to the Japanese until Wall St invaded Silicon Valley in the 1990's. And as much as I support it, the private space industry, imho, is just not in a position to do anything over the next ten years, except put a small number of people/small payload in low orbit. As much as we marvel as what Burt Rutan has been able to do, with his limited resources, it's laughable to suggest that his technology can even begin to compete with what NASA does on a bad day. It's Little League vs Major League.

SciFi Channel redux..

I guess I spoke too soon. SciFi has a *2 day* Twilight Zone marathon going on, right now.
What a fricking waste of airtime.. Just when you thought there was hope...

Christmas sales.. not too bad.

So it looks like not all the financial news, this Xmas, is bad. Apparently, the sales dropoff in stores was only 2%->4%, and Amazon had a monster Xmas, with sales up 17%.

If you're an MBA, spreadsheet driven bean-counting 80's Reaganaut, that might seem like a disaster, but considering the general atmosphere, it's not a bad result for the stores, bearing in mind that to really get a pulse on the economy, we have to see what happens now that the winter sales season has started. Amazon's results suggest that at least part of the drop-off in brick & mortar sales have been made up by online sales, which is a trend that, quite frankly, many people expected to be stronger.

From an economic perspective. it seems to be reasonably good news, as is all activity in the retail sector. It suggests that if the government can stabilize the housing market, by reducing the number of foreclosures and hence allowing the banks to take small but absorbable losses, then we might be in for a much softer landing in the consumer economy than would otherwise occur.

The curse of the Spurs

There's always some relapse, or twist of fate against these guys. You just knew it was going to happen.

It's time to perform an exorcism, sacrifice a chicken or something.. At least try to get the forces of the supernatural world working for the Suns, instead of against them.

SciFI Holiday marathon

Sci FI deserves approbation for putting on Star Trek NG, and Highlander marathons on Xmas & Boxing Day.

This is better, guys. Much better.

Oh Ricky...

Ricky Gervais, live, doing the kind of comedy that only the Brits seem to have a handle on. A sick subject, but it made me laugh out loud.

Ricky Gervais: Hitler Interprets Nietzsche - watch more funny videos

Xmas Repo Man music

Coming from the UK, we got a lot of the NY East Coast Punk scene (Blondie, Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, etc...), but aside from the Dead Kennedys and Wall of Voodoo, not much of the West Coast punk scene, and little from the LA scene. In fact, the only thing we got in abundance from the LA music scene in those days, were the Sunset Strip metal/hair bands like Van Halen, Ratt and Motley Crue.

Anyhoo, this is "Reel Ten", by the Plugz. I love everything they did on the soundtrack to Repo Man, especially the punk version of "Ride of the Valkyries".

Xmas Holdsworth

Kinder, from the Velvet Darkness record.
Most people, including Allan himself, don't realize just how much of a monster player he is on acoustic, where his melodic sense is dramatically different to his electric playing, and has a nice Ralph Towner vibe. He should play more acoustic.

Xmas guitar (part 1)

This has been one of my favorite pieces of music, ever since I was a child, and is performed by probably the greatest living classical guitarist, John Williams.

Merb/rails merger

The Merb & Rails dev groups have decided to merge their two projects into one.

This merger in unprecedented. I can't recall a situation where two such projects, with such orthogonal but functionally overlapping code bases, were joined together. Sure, there have been projects that have been joined, but these were either two forks of a single original project recombining, or two projects that were usually combined in installation.

I think this one announcement illustrates the power of Ruby more than anything else could. This kind of thing wouldn't even be possible, outside of Lisp. Certainly, the Python community is strewn with the corpses of duplicate projects. Even the Numpy/Numerical Python guys had *major* issues.

A tune for the times.

Amazingly underrated band, except by muso types. Great powerful sound live.
Anyhoo, the song is prescient.

The Warren inauguration benediction.

The LGBT community is all in a tizzy about Rick Warren being invited to lead prayers at the Obama inauguration. I understand the outrage, but in the grand scheme of things this will help them.

Why? because, by giving Warren this opportunity, Obama is essentially anointing him as the reader of the Christianist movement at a time, because of the Republican election failures, that group has a massive leadership void. This preemptive move essentially forces the Dobsons and Robertsons out of the picture, and neuters their power.

Why does this matter ? Because despite the fact that Warren is infact almost as homophobic and hateful as the old Christianist guard, he isn't as vitriolic, nor is he much of a power broker or political animal. And that means that when Obama pushes through his proposals for ending DADT and other anti-gay legislation, the opposition will be much weaker than it would be now.

IMHO, the LGBT community needs to stop getting outraged by symbolic acts, and needs to focus on getting it's shit together to move it's own agenda forward. You only have to look at the total amateurish effort to defeat Prop 8, here in California, to see that. At the end of the day, those actual political battles are more important.

Still, that's not to say that the LGBT people shouldn't play hardball against the Mormons, Evangelists and the rest of the religious right. By all means go after the Rollers' tax status, planning, construction and other permits, and make them feel some financial/legal pain.

Credit where credit is due

The SciFi channel has greenlit Caprica, the prequel to Battlestar Galactica. For all my complaining about them, they deserve kudos for this great news. This bodes well for intelligent, non-dumbed down, and well written TV.

Actually, I'm hoping Universal/NBC will rerun Caprica in one of those 10pm slots they're currently struggling to fill, like they're doing with Monk. It seems to me that all their best shows are on their cable channels, where editorial interference from NBC's execs seems to be much less, than on the network.

I'm fully convinced that those execs had much to do with the decline in quality of Heroes, and don't really get the notion that you fixate an audience with ideas rather than stunts and special effects.