No one knows quite what to call the Prelude, the floating behemoth that Shell engineered to extract natural gas from below the ocean floor and liquify it for use. It’s hard to describe Prelude because it’s so much bigger and more complex than any other floating structure humans have ever built—which is also what makes it difficult to photograph.
As handy as services like AirDrop or Android Beam may be for shuffling content between nearby devices, they’re platform-exclusive. That’s not much help if you want to share photos from your Android phone to an iPhone, or vice versa. However, Google…
* Branson to meet Virgin space team after crash (Updates with Branson and NTSB in Mojave)
By Lucy Nicholson and Irene Klotz
MOJAVE, Calif./CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Nov 1 (Reuters) – B illionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson said on Saturday he was determined to find out what caused a passenger spaceship being developed by his space tourism company to crash during a test flight in California’s Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and injuring the other.
Branson arrived in California to meet his Virgin Galactic team and with federal officials who arrived to begin their investigation into Friday’s accident, the second in less than a week involving a commercial space company.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo went down during a powered test flight, scattering debris over the Mojave Desert, 95 miles (150 km) north of Los Angeles.
“We owe it to our pilots to find out exactly what went wrong,” Branson said during a news conference in Mojave.
“If we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on,” he said.
One pilot was killed and the other was able to parachute from the craft and was badly hurt, authorities said. The identities of the pilots have not yet been released.
A team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the crash site on Saturday to begin piecing together what led to the accident.
“This was a test flight, and test flights are typically very well documented in terms of data,” said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the NTSB. “We may have lots of evidence that will help us with the investigative process,” he said.
Friday’s crash was the second disaster in less than a week suffered by a private space company, dealing a blow to the fledgling commercial space industry that has been taking on work traditionally done by governments.
On Tuesday, an Antares rocket built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp exploded after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.
NEW TYPE of FUEL
The Virgin probe will likely will focus on SpaceShipTwo’s rocket engine, which on Friday was flying with a new type of fuel for the first time, experts said.
The solid plastic-type propellant is ignited by nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.
Virgin Galactic announced in May that it was replacing the rubber-based propellant used during the spaceship’s three previous rocket-powered test flights to get better performance.
“We’ve tested both of these fuel grains a lot,” Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides told Reuters at the time.
Before Friday’s flight, SpaceShipTwo’s last powered test flight was in January, though the rocket and its new propellant had passed multiple ground tests.
Virgin Galactic is a U.S. offshoot of the London-based Virgin Group founded by Branson, one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs whose business empire ranges from airlines to music stores and mobiles phones.
Both crew members of the spaceship were test pilots for Scaled Composites, the Northrop Grumman Corp subsidiary that designed and built the spacecraft for Virgin and lost three other employees in a July 2007 ground test accident.
“While not a NASA mission, the pain of this (new)tragedy will be felt by all the men and women who have devoted their lives to exploration,” NASA, the U.S. space agency, said in a statement. (Additional reporting and writing by Victoria Cavaliere; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Chizu Nomiyama)
A rare species of deer, whose perhaps most distinctive feature is its pointy, vampire-like fangs, has been rediscovered roaming in the wilderness of Afghanistan more than half a century after last being spotted.
The lava flow currently creeping across Hawaii Island’s Puna region is luring residents to the flow front like moths to a flame.
But while some onlookers sat in lawn chairs outside police-enforced barricades, patiently waiting to see the flow cross the street, Puna resident Ruth Crawford drove to a lobe of the flow to see it firsthand. She and friends allegedly trespassed on county property and dunked a bunch of household objects — like golf clubs, forks, coins and an egg beater — into the lava for fun.
(Story continues below…)
After telling the media about the adventure, Crawford and her friend Stephan Paul Koch were arrested and charged with second-degree criminal trespassing. They were released on $250 bail.
Crawford, who is 59 years old, told HuffPost that she’s embarrassed now and acknowledged that, “We shouldn’t have done it and feel awkward because we got arrested. … It’s really rich to be my age and have my mugshot on the Internet.”
The lava might be slow-moving, but officials warn it’s still plenty dangerous. Unpredictable methane gas explosions can shake the ground and throw debris into the air. If a lava onlooker lost his or her balance, officials warn, he or she could fall into the 2,000-degree lava.
Crawford, it seems, wasn’t thinking about those dangers. She told reporters that she went, “Just because it’s lava and I’ve been here 23 years and I was kind of excited and scared and just wanted to do it.”
We can all learn a lesson from Ruth. If the cops catch you throwing a hand mixer into the Puna lava flow right now, they’ll tell you to beat it.
Today’s forecast calls for smiles with intermittent fits of laughter.
This, courtesy of Charlie Hale, a second-grader in Chicago, who joined the WGN Morning News for the station’s “Friday Forecaster” segment last week, and gave the weather report of a lifetime.
Despite his clear on-camera abilities as a meteorologist, however, Charlie told WGN-TV’s Paul Konrad he has other careers in mind. Charlie says he could be a police officer, for instance, because he loves danger. He also wants to be a millionaire. Or a soccer player.
And did we mention he has some pretty sweet dance moves?
WATCH the segment above. For more of Charlie’s antics, click through to WGN-TV to see a second interview.
An armed guard who rode on an elevator with President Barack Obama and his aides at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta was not a convicted felon, as previously reported by the Washington Post.
The Post clarified Saturday, according to two people briefed on the September incident, that the unidentified private security contractor only had a criminal record.
Secret Service agents questioned the man after he drew attention by recording images of the president with a camera in the elevator. Officials then ran a background check that revealed prior arrests in his history.
The change is significant because one day after the Post and the Washington Examiner published reports on the incident on September 30, Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned. The story was one more embarrassment for the embattled agency, which was already facing the ire of Congress after a man managed to hop a fence and enter the White House.
My, Beyonce, what big … claws you have!
If only every late-night dance session could be this well executed, the world would be a better place. Hats off to you, bub.
H/T Reddit
State-level K-12 education spending has fallen dramatically in many states since 2008. In that time, 29 states cut per pupil spending, shifting the burden of financing education to local school districts and, in many instances, forcing schools to cut costs and even teachers.
Voting is one of American’s main civic duties, second only to flag brandishing, competitive eating and stimulating the economy at the Macy’s 4th of July White Sale. Yet according to the non-profit research and analysis organization FairVote.org, only about 60 percent of the eligible voting population casts their ballot during presidential election years, and only about 40 percent will do so during the midterm. At first, you may be tempted to think “Hey that is pretty good! I thought it was much lower” and then you, too, would have been duped by whom ever continues to crank out the buzzkill-y “disengaged populace” rhetoric. Good news: voter turn out is not as low as you may have thought. It’s just that it is 10 percent lower than any other comparable democracies. So there’s that. Is this bad news? After all, this is ‘Merica we live in; Land of the free, home of people who dropped the ‘A’.
Each election year there is a large get-out-the vote effort. Some of the more disingenuous vote-or-die folks will say “I don’t care who you vote for, just get out there and vote.” What a crock of horse bollocks. Of course they care who you vote for. I know I do. I want you to vote, and I want you to vote for the Democrat. If there was a Green Party candidate, or someone who would stand behind environmental regulations, push a green energy economy, reign in wall street, uphold and defend freedom of the press, and the right to privacy, strengthen organized labor, and support worker-owned businesses, (I’m looking at you, Bernie Sanders) then I would want you to vote for them. Voter suppression aside, I can’t imagine that there is even one person to be found who believes in the ideology of voting above the outcome of the election. Face it, no one involved in a Get Out The Vote effort would volunteer to spend 8 hours fake-smiling over a molten plastic folding table in the parking lot of some Publix to get you to vote for someone they don’t support.
In order to get the non-endangered American non-voter to show up and vote, GOTV folks use 2 time tested mother-approved techniques: Guilt and Shame. They suggest not casting your ballot is one of the worst things you, a patriotic American can do. “Don’t you know men and women marched, fought, and died” for your right to choose between a rich prick and another rich prick?
First of all, I can easily think of 10 things worse than not voting.
The Top 10 Things Worse Than Not Voting:
10) Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
9) Leaving a tampon applicator on the beach.
8) Letting your kid scream it out, it’s good for him, who cares if there are other
people on the flight.
7) Bigotry
6) Low T
5) Too Much T
4) Running a right wing talking point media empire and calling it news.
3) Climate Denial
2) Being David Gregory
1) Monsanto
There are several types classifications of people who do not vote. I’ll focus on 3 main types: The Uninformed, Subversives, and Miscellaneous Other. The individual American non-voter needs to be treated according to their type, not with an ‘all of the above’ policy. That kind of thinking never works; just look at President Obama’s energy policy. We’re getting totally fracked.
The following is my letter to American non-voters. I hope this letter shall be used as an example to the vote-shamers everywhere, as it lays bare the secret fear lying deep in their hearts: that not all of America’s non-voting population should be encouraged to cast a ballot.
Dear American Non-Voter;
You are receiving this letter because you are one of the 40 percent of America’s eligible voters who does not cast a ballot on Election Day. I’m not here to shame you… at least not about the voting.
If you happened to be one of the non-voting uninformed, (you know who you are…or… perhaps you don’t) I’d like to take this time to offer you a special message: Thank you. Thank you very much for staying home on Election Day (it’s the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November in an election year, by the way). Thank you for not casting a ballot in favor of a candidate who may undermine the social fabric of our country. Thank you for not trusting “The Most Trusted Name In Television News” ™ to tell you what to think. If you know that you don’t know what is going on and you don’t vote because if it, then you are a responsible citizen. If you know that you don’t know what is going on, and you go find out, you will no doubt realize that unless you are part of the 1% or deluded by religious fanaticism, there is absolutely no loving and humanitarian reason to vote for a Republican, much less a Tea Bagger, and then you vote, you are a patriot of the highest order. The danger to our society lies not in you (or y’all as the case may be) but in those uninformed voters who vote.
As even some uninformed voters know, uninformed voters are not necessarily stupid people. You do not have to be literate to understand justice and peace. Just like you don’t need any learnin’ to understand any show on The Learning Channel. But there is a difference; informed voters don’t waste their time ‘learning’ from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. They are too busy watching Democracy Now, reading Matt Taibbi and questioning everything.
No, not all uninformed voters are lacking intelligence. Not all of their jaws are slackened. Mostly, you are folks who have watched too much Fox News, which, when it comes down to it, is any amount of Fox News. According to a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind ™people who watch Fox News are less informed and less knowledgeable about current events than people who watch no news at all. The study holds true for those who watch MSNBC as well. Yes, that is true, according to the study. Now go get an 80% post-consumer-non-Georgia Pacific-subsidiary paper towel and wipe up the mouthful of grande skim mocha you spit all over this book after reading that. I’ll wait.
The Fairleigh Dickinson study holds true for MSNBC viewers as well. I’d prefer to believe that is not true and certainly insist it cannot be to the same degree. Perhaps they mean viewers of Morning Joe, which is hosted by a former Republican from the great hate state of Florida. Or maybe they mean folks who watch beltway insider and power sycophant Chuck Todd’s The Daily Run Down, for some inside-the-box thinking are less informed about the reality of events. Certainly those that tune in to Chuck every morning at 9 am EST to hear what information government officials and corporations are releasing and repurposing are not truly informed. Aren’t official government talking points meant to keep folk fat and happy or angry but not at the proper targets or generally misled? By the way, the appearance of those shows on MSNBC confirms that it is truly a liberal network. Who else would give valuable air-time to Republicans and company men in order to be ‘fair’? Either that or its just your average corporate media squeeze out of any kind of progressive talk. Lord knows they are squeezing progressive talk radio shows off the air faster than Suszanne Sommers can squeeze her way to shapelier hips and thighs.
It can be argued that all corporate sponsored media cannot be unquestionably relied on to put the interests of the people above the interests of their profit margins. That is what corporations are for, maximizing profit. The Fairleigh Dickinson study suggests that if we rely solely on corporate media to get our information, we are all uninformed voters. Scary. Now I see why zombie movies are so popular; art reflects life. Also one could stave to death looking for a working brain. The fact that airports, elevators, taxi cabs and even the friggin’ Rockaway, Queens Bagel Shoppe are all pumping Fox or CNN’s fear and hate speech into our brain-spaces makes me question if MSNBC is as bad as these other networks. Never once have I been assaulted by Chris Hayes’s upbeat concern for humanity while waiting for Jetblue flight 460 to board Zone 3. Perhaps ideas discussed on some MSNBC shows might actually be a bit more threatening to the corporate stronghold over our democracy, like organized labor, civil rights, and equality. They sure do love Obama though. And war talk. Nonetheless, if that study is correct, most of us don’t have a clue. The scary part of the uninformed population is not how many uninformed non-voters there are, but how many uninformed voters.
So thanks again uninformed non-voters. Thanks for staying out of it. If you ever feel like giving in to the public pressure to vote, or question whether not voting is worth the scarlet letter of non-participation shame, consider this: a big red “Non-Voter” on your lapel is less publically humiliating than being seen with a McCain/Palin 2008 button or anything Bush-related. I encourage you to stay home.
This brings me to another type of non-voter: Subversives. I am not referring to those of you who would like to over throw the government or shrink it down so small you can murder it in your bubble bath. I am not talking about Birchers, Birthers, or ‘Baggers. I am talking to those of you who feel that the American experiment has gone so horribly awry that it is further beyond repair than your 1971 VW Bus. I am talking to those of you who say “The system is rigged. What is the point of voting?” You, who have dared to read alternative accounts that counter official narratives. You, who are well aware of the corrupting influence of money in politics, the secret wars, the malfeasance of the NSA, CIA, FBI and other clandestine agencies with three letter acronyms. I am speaking to those of you who think that the government is totally bought and sold by the corporations and that all elected officials are puppets dancing on the string of some shadowy master.
I have only one thing to say to you: ROCK ON.
But I beg of thee to vote. Its funny how those who know too little should not vote and those who know too much don’t want to. Sure, maybe we won’t stop global climate disruption but you could help make it better for your uncle Bruce and aunt Steve before sea level rise destroys their Fire Island bungalow. You could help allow some windmills to go up so that if a real Progressive gets into office, we will already have a running start. At worst, you’d be making sure, when the apocolype comes, the doomsday preppers aren’t the only ones with heat. You don’t have to love the candidate, wear the buttons or drink the Kool-aid.
If not, you are just one more person that the system is using for their own benefit. One more potential participant made mute. Its convenient for the powers that be that you don’t to vote. They want you to pay just enough taxes to keep the arms manufacturers from going hungry but not enough to cover a social safety net so that you and your neighbors won’t. Go ahead, work your shift at the coop, reread The Boiling Frogs Report, strain your neck by nodding too hard at Chomsky’s next lecture and don’t vote. You are playing right into the hands of oppression. Congratulations. I offer you a heartfelt thanks a lot. But this time it’s more sarcastic than the thank you card I sent Uncle Ed for the $15 Olive Garden gift card he gave us from himself and his 5 eater-spawn who came to my wedding. I guess keeping up that classic European car collection on an oil executive salary is hard these days.
I promised I wouldn’t shame you. I am just asking you to reconsider your stance. And I never said I wouldn’t try guilt. I hope it works.
Thank you,
Julianna Forlano
Citizen
PS: I did mention the miscellaneous category of American non-voters. You may find yourself in this category for the following reasons:
1) Sight/smell of middle schools gymnasiums or church basements creates overly-painful flashback to pre-teen angst. (Usually only affects Liberals)
2) You live ‘completely unplugged from the grid, man’ and didn’t realize that it was an election year, or November, or Tuesday. (Again, Liberals, this time far left)
3) You’ve been disenfranchised! Perhaps it was a voter purge technique or possibly being run through the Prison Industrial Complex on some small ridiculous possession charge, paid your debt to society, and still aren’t allowed to vote (Mostly People of Color; probable Democrats.)
4) You were too busy as a captain of industry controlling America’s media/investment banks/fossil fuel industry and what’s-the-difference-your-lobbyist-will-get-you-whatever you-want-no-matter-who-wins. (Republicans, the 1%)
5) Freedom!!!!!!! (Libertarians)
6) Too busy keeping your government hands off your government. (Tea-Party)
Addressing the miscellaneous category is beyond the scope of this letter. (Especially #6) but can be seen in my upcoming novel on voter suppression “50 Shades of Wicked Foul Play”.
Excerpted with permission form the book “Letters to The American Voter”:
http://laughingliberallythebook.com/
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
