REPUBLICANS CONTINUE TO DESTROY EARTH
(And mainly because they don’t like Al Gore)
Buried in yesterday’s NY Times oped page was a story that made my blood boil (and I use the metaphor very deliberately.) Here’s an excerpt...

"In science, nature is the sole arbiter. Disputes are resolved only by better experiments. The better experiment when it comes to global warming was to be the climate observatory, situated in space at the neutral-gravity point between the Sun and Earth. Called Lagrange 1, or L1, this point is about one million miles from Earth. At L1, with a view of the full disk of the Sun in one direction, and a full sunlit Earth in the opposite, the observatory could continuously monitor Earth's energy balance. It was given a poetic name, Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor aboard Christopher Columbus's ship who first sighted the New World. Development began in November 1998 and it was ready for launching three years later. The cost was only about $100 million. For comparison, that is only one-thousandth the cost of the International Space Station, which serves no useful purpose. Before Triana could be launched, however, there was a presidential election. Many of the industries favored by the new Bush White House were not anxious to have the cause of global warming pinned down. The launching was put on hold."

And let’s face it, $100 million is fucking chump change. I actually know someone with that kinda scratch. For the full story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15park.html?th&emc=th
And also
http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/future/triana.html

I’ve posted Clive Thompson’s link before, but his blog of science/pop-culture tales is so neat, here it is again... http://www.collisiondetection.net/

The secret word is Fried