Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) successfully conducted a full mission-length firing of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle's first stage at its McGregor Test Facility in Texas, on November 22. For the static test firing, the first stage remains firmly secured to the massive vertical test stand, where it fired for 178 seconds or nearly three minutes — simulating the climb of the giant rocket from the surface of the Earth towards orbit.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Press

So is there another way to get to the same place? I think there is, but it will require the active involvement of both Congress and the new Obama administration. Think back to the Chrysler bailout in the 1980s. In return for legislation that gave the company a $1.5 billion federally guaranteed loan — the number seems so quaint now, like Dr. Evil demanding a $1 million ransom! — Chrysler had to obtain serious concessions from its union workers. The union had resisted Chrysler’s efforts to negotiate a new deal, but with the federal guarantee at stake, it relented.

There is no reason the government couldn’t do something similar now, though it would dangle a much larger loan agreement in return for much more radical changes. Someone in the Obama administration, with both business savvy and a suitably tough-minded approach, could bring together the parties, including the dealers, the union and the company. He (or she) could force the union and the company to renegotiate their contracts. With his input, Congress could perhaps pass a law that dealt with the state laws governing dealerships. (Or the government could pay off the dealers itself, instead of having G.M. do it.) He could sign off on plant closings. He could force the companies to come up with real plans that would return them to profitability. And in return, the government would make federal loans that would give them the breathing room they need.

Come to think of it, this would be a perfect first job for Lawrence Summers, who is expected to become an economic adviser to the president-elect. If he can’t knock these heads together, nobody can.

I'm in favor of helping Detroit "bridge the gap" but with conditions:

All of the current management is replaced.
All of the union contracts are broken.
They stop fighting CAFE and stop leaning on SUV sales to prop them up. GM actually has some really interesting r&d in this space (skateboard cars, etc), they just need to bring it to market!

Talking Business - Road Ahead Is Long for G.M. - NYTimes.com

British regulators rejected a plan on Friday to add locally focused video news to BBC Web sites in Britain, dealing a setback to the digital ambitions of the BBC, which has expanded aggressively on the Internet.

Regulators Reject BBC Plan on Web Video News - NYTimes.com

Appearing to cave to Hollywood demands, Apple has quietly added a restrictive copyright protection mechanism to its new MacBooks that is preventing customers from watching movies on external displays.

Apple Bends to Studios, Adds Copyright Protection to MacBooks | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

The Space Frontier Foundation today pointed out that NASA Administrator Dr. Michael Griffin, in an interview with CBS News published last Friday, publicly contradicted his own 2003 testimony to Congress about the safety of flying humans on America's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELVs). "It's one thing for Mike to argue that EELVs can't send astronauts all the way to the Moon. But on Friday he claimed that EELVs are not safe enough, even for the easier job of launching astronauts to Earth orbit, and that's just not true," said Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka.

Will the Real Mike Griffin Please Stand Up? | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes.

The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species.

Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million - NYTimes.com

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

Op-Ed Columnist - How to Fix a Flat - NYTimes.com

Mr. Roberts is president of Connect Ithaca, a volunteer group that works on community issues like sprawl, and the heavy traffic is one reason he was hooked when he heard about the next generation of automotive technology — personal rapid transit, more commonly known as pod cars.

I'm not sure how I missed this article a few months ago. I was really enamored with the idea of PRT for awhile but I now think that as it's typically formulated, it's a non-starter:

"Stations" are an Achilles' heal. They add a lot of cost esp. when you want to make them ADA compliant, etc. Since they're on rails one way or another, the blind octogenarian with a heart condition who gets her umbrella stuck in the door bogs everything down. If you put all stations on a siding, they cost that much more and take up that much more space. If you don't, then the problem with one car stops the whole line.
You can't possibly build enough stations to avoid a last-mile problem.
The guideways are an eyesore and people don't want them around.

I now think robotic taxis are the answer for urban areas. If we can figure out a way to power them in-situ, from overhead lines, say, like the buses in SF, all the better. Maybe just inductive charging when you're stopped at an intersection. You pull out your smartphone and push a button and the system dispatches one to your location. I don't know the breakdown but I would have to guess the vast majority of the cost of a cab fare is the driver and the overhead of the cab company, not gas or the car. And maybe these don't even need to go more than 30mph, can be a "skateboard" car with in-hub motors, very few moving parts, low-maintainence, low-power, etc.

Unfortunately, noone seems to be taking a pragmatic approach to autonomous driving. The academics, as usual, are chasing the "unobtainium" solution. The Grand Challenge attracts a lot more attention than something as simple and inexpensive as burying magnetic reference markers in the street. There actually is some work going on at Berkeley (PATH) and UC Davis under the heading of "intelligent roadway" but it doesn't seem to be nearly as flashy as Grand Challenge. And it's a bad chicken+egg problem: automakers aren't interested unless the infrastructure exists and road agencies can't afford to blow money on pie-in-the-sky visions like this much less even afford to maintain the roads and bridges they have.

Ithaca Takes a Hard Look at Pod Cars - NYTimes.com

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Study shows how spammers cash in