Friday, June 15, 2007
It's now official: the LHC will not attempt a November startup. Because
electricity in Geneva is prohibitively expensive in the winter that puts
it off until April. Which opened up the possibility of keeping the
Tevatron, at Fermilab in Batavia, IL running through 2010, giving the
venerable accelerator an additional year to look for evidence of the
legendary Higgs boson (WN 30 Mar 07) .
Perhaps when "the God particle" is confirmed it will inspire a new exhibit
at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY - perhaps.
Today was supposed to be the day astronauts would stitch up a rip in a
thermal blanket that tore on launch. Atlantis is docked at the ISS on a
13-day construction mission to install new segments of solar panels to
enhance the energy supply in preparation for Europe's Columbus module
which is supposed to join the ISS later this year. Plans changed when
three Russian computers crashed. The computers maintain orientation of
the ISS and control oxygen levels. The Russians think electrical noise
from the new solar panels is to blame. They did what you and I would do,
they rebooted, but the computers re-crashed. We all have days like this
with our computers. In space it leads to scary talk about abandoning the
ISS.
The Associated Press this week quoted a letter from the chief of NOAA to a
Florida Congressman warning that although the aging QuikScat satellite
could fail at any moment, replacement plans have been pushed back to
2016. Loss of QuikScat would seriously degrade predictions of the
intensity and path of hurricanes. It was launched in 1999 with a design
life of two to three years.
Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) normally work pretty well
together, considering the ideological space between them, but Bingaman,
who chairs Energy and Natural Resources is chief sponsor of a wide-ranging
energy bill that mandates a major increase in automobile and light truck
(read SUV) fuel efficiency (to 35mpg) and requires utilities to get 15% of
their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. The Bush administration
and many Republican senators want a bill that promotes drilling to push
down the price at the pump. In fact, the drop in gas prices for the past
three weeks is the really bad news. We need $5 gasoline to begin changing
life styles.
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