Faceplant, or it didn't happen.

All I want to know is if this is sufficient to make the dirty hippies shut the hell up about their "trips".

How do they even know the ice is thick enough to support the weight of the car NOW?!? I mean, clearly it got there somehow. Someone's bad judgment about ice thickness and whatnot ended up with an improvised submarine. How do they decide that now is the time to try?

Something tells me that this guy is going to win all the money. Not that it makes what happened okay, but it wouldn't hurt.

Comment #1: Oh, so THAT'S Father Albert. When the scandal broke, the whole thing sounded like a freakin' TRAIN WRECK.

Comment #2: As always, Henry says it best: http://videosift.com/video/Henry-Rollins-Letter-to-Ann-Coulter

I recall going to the Museum of the Confederacy (across the street from the WAAAAY worth it D-Day Museum), and in a very discrete corner, they mention that, in the early days of Secession, a number of Freedmen came to the various recruitment offices, asking to join up. In their eyes, they weren't going to let those damn Yankees push them around. The commanding officer of New Orleans very politely stated, "No," and let the matter drop. Which is everything you need to know about slavery being the root cause of the civil war.

Wait...his name is Mulva? So Seinfeld wasn't totally off base. Huh.

Saw this the other day on the side of the bus, and my jaw dropped.

On a less serious note, these dudes are actually keeping us alive! Think about it--Joshua ben Joseph said that he'd come like a theif in the night, and that we'd know not the hour nor the day. All these yahoos are doing is scratching off one more day it could possibly happen. Keep it up, guys! Your paranoia literally sustains us all!

My understanding is that they'll do it for the calcium in order to grow antlers. http://www.cracked.com/article_19126_5-adorable-animals-that-are-turning-to-dark-side.html It's what happens when you severely curtail their historical range.

>> ^Mcboinkens:

This is so ridiculous I can't even really take the comparison seriously. Not discovering the Americas earlier in the history of Earth was mostly due to our own ignorance. We though the world was flat, and assumed nothing else existed. The vikings are alleged to have made it to the Americas much earlier than Columbus, even.
On the other hand, physics is holding us back in space. Sure, if we learn how to bend spacetime or use wormholes we may have a shot at getting off earth, but it's silly as hell to think it will actually happen within the next 1000 years or so. By that time, we'll probably all be extinct already.
Terra-forming is out of the question, it would be impossible in anything but science fiction, and the only reasonable planet we could even do it to is Mars, which we can hardly get a probe to that worked successfully. Will we make progress? Yeah, definitely. But to think we'll leave this planet is absurd. The only hope for humanity is progress in renewable energy, population control(limiting births, not promoting genocide)and learning to accept other people for their culture and religion. The faster we figure that out, the better off we'll be.
Also, that west wing clip was flat out dumb. Sending men to Mars would do nothing for us but inflate our Space-peen. There is literally nothing to gain from sending humans there rather than robots. It is riskier both cost and liability-wise. The only thing remotely useful would be setting up a base, which would require huge funds, and a ridiculous amount of new research. Plus, they really wouldn't be able to do much once it was set up. We already know the atmosphere, composition, and features of Mars. What would a man do?


First, the issue of whether or not the earth was flat was pretty much settled by Pythagoras in the 6th century BCE. Columbus had so much trouble drumming up funds precisely because anyone who knew anything about cartography (i.e., the Portugese) knew that he was either lying or suicidally deluded. We don't know why Columbus thought what he thought, and we probably never will. Perhaps he believed but could not prove that there HAD to be something between the Western coast of Ireland and the eastern coast of Japan. As for why no one else tried it, you're right. Others had. Don't forget that there is strong evidence of others visiting the Americas prior to the Vikings. Given how many Polynesians must have given their lives to map out the ocean currents that led to the fragments of rock jutting out of the ocean, it was apparently something intrinsic to the species, but no longer as strong a yearning.

And I never precluded the use of robots to get us where we're going, at least initially. I do think that there is tremendous hubris in the fields of science when it comes to what we know and what is left for us to discover. It does seem like there's a lot of space out there, and the distance which once seemed so insignificant to the early sci fi writers now seems insurmountable. I take Pascal's Wager (or at least the fallacious logic that drives it) and say that the actions we must take to get us out there would benefit the human race as a whole far more than it would hurt. To give up would be to surrender to a nihilism quite endemic in the species. Consider for a moment the construction of the cathedrals. Would such populist public work projects even be possible in this day and age? Would the average Joe be willing to start a project, knowing that he would not be able to live to see its completion? If we don't get off this rock, I blame that attitude far more than I blame the laws of physics.

To get back to the present topic, it's possible that the railgun technology being developed could serve as a kind of propulsion, but it seems as if they've worked out the mechanics of the propulsion, and only need to get the scale down pat. They know how to send something really fast, but they want to weaponize it, to better kill at a distance, an attitude that has never won us many friends. As a result, I'd pull money out of this program.

Finally, I cannot really respond to your dismissal of a manned trip to Mars, because it's clear that you don't see what I and so many others see. Maybe it's a simple matter of me being that Polynesian sitting on the shore of Rapa Nui, wondering what other islands were out there. You, on the other hand, would rather we invent some better way to catch fish, or to figure out what to tell people so they don't chop all the freaking trees down and doom us all to a nasty population crash. Your instinct and my instinct don't run contrary to each other, as long as I'm willing to plant a few trees on my way out to sea. What you learn and what you do help me to do what I want, and what I might learn would benefit you and what you do.

>> ^Mcboinkens:
To be fair, what has the ISS accomplished? It seems ignorant to ask, and the budget is much, much smaller in comparison, but if we are arguing what spending could be cut, pretty much anything could be a target.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN-gR9040fw

Because it's what's next. Right now it seems a drowsy step as we tumble into the larger stellar neighborhood, but every step we take away from our cradle ensures that it will not necessarily be our grave. The distances involved seem insurmountable, but so too did the distance between Eurasia and the Americas might have seemed to an ancestor, astride a hollowed out log (and even then, the Polynesians navigated unimaginable distances with tech that was hardly better than that ancestor). We need this as a species. I believe but cannot prove that a greater malaise has infected us as a species due to light pollution. Take a city kid out to a field in the middle of nowhere, and show him the Milky Way in all its glory, and he will gasp in transcendental delight. We no longer see such wonders, except as static images in books and on TV. We do need to feed the masses of humanity, but I believe that an understanding of our place in things makes us more likely to see that we are 'trapped' here, and need to care for our fellow prisoners, and that we will never truly escape unless we all go as one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVbnRbTi5XA

"Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theatre?"

I think it's all about the 'honest service fraud' laws, which the supreme court declared were unconstitutionally vague.

This is one of those things that simply make my jaw drop in utter horror. You elect someone to office, and that someone proceeds to enrich themselves and others at the expense of the taxpayer, despite laws that say, "You can't do that," and instead of hauling them off to jail, the Supreme Court says, "Eh, but whaddaya mean by "enrich" and "expense?" That's too vague." It's a wonder that the insider trading statutes hold up in court.

My dad liked to say, "God's greatest gift is unanswered prayers." I kinda agree with him, especially when I listen to crap like this.

>> ^robbersdog49:

I went to a school where bullying was just a fact of life. The normal advice you got was to stand up to bullies. It doesn't work. This video is a real one off. If this had happened at my school the big kid who stepped up at 0:27 would have kicked the shit out of the fat kid.


Exactly so. Forget everything you know (or think you know) about why kids bully. We used to think that it was insecure kids seeking to tear down kids that are even MORE insecure, and that the bullying was a consequence of problems at home, etc.

The problem was that all the federal dollars that went towards studying the problem looked at juvenile delinquents, who, as you might imagine, have messed up home lives and self-esteem issues. Even though all the populations studied were far from random, the view that bullies have antisocial tendencies predominated.

Then Columbine happened. Despite what you might think of Kleibold and Harris, they were in fact bullied, and not by kids from broken homes. The people who tormented them were from upper middle class homes with two parents and no problems. Suddenly the federal dollars manifested to study ALL children, and they discovered something astonishing (tho not to someone who'd ever been bullied):

Bullies bully because it works. And we teach them this at a very early age. How? Imagine one of those "paygrounds," with the ball pit and the curvy slides. A team studies literally thousands of interactions between children and their peers via closed circuit cameras. They watched as children who did not know one another navigated the various social networks that would form and dissolve in front of their eyes. From time to time, a kid would get socially aggressive, and the other child would seek succor from an adult. Now the adult probably has the belief that "they have to work it out for themselves," and so must make a choice between intervening and not. Otherwise, children learn to 'tattle', to recruit a heavy (in the form of an adult) to get his or her way, right.

So, out of, say, ten of these instances, how many times has the aggrieved child made an earnest effort to negotiate on a peer level, and actually needs an adult for intervention? 1 time? Half the time? Try 9 times out of ten. And almost always, the adult rebuffs the child. So this teaches the socially aggressive child that he or she can do whatever he or she pleases, and no one will come to the aid of their victim. Welcome to the Serengeti, children. It's as if we never left.

So what's to be done? As a teacher, I've thought about it a lot. First, I ALWAYS intervene. This means that 10% of the time, I fall for sheer crap-weasel-ness, but that only works once. If another intervention is needed, I keep an eye on the petitioner, and if he or she's becoming an instigator, it's time for a little time out, usually with no explanation (until after class is over). The next is to muck with the social dynamic. I control the environment in the room, not the students. They can interact with each other as much as they want, but I control all the mundane things that add up to so much in the long run.

What this kid was demonstrating in this video was the Ender Wiggins's School of Social Dynamism, which is that if you show yourself capable of great rage that can be tightly controlled, people will give you a wide berth. Is it right? I don't know how long the bullying had occurred, nor what measures had been instituted to resolve the problem. If it's the average American school, 1) too long, and 2) not enough.

Oh, and don't forget the role of the other crap-weasels in this video--the instigators with the cameraphone. Like the now infamous Epic Old Man video, the 'videographer' talked a lot of smack, and failed to help in any way. They too need to be punished for aiding to an atmosphere where such an outcome was likely. Luckily, someone was stupid enough to make a recording of exactly what they were saying.