Daily Archives: 22 Dec 04

Mystery Martian ‘Carwash’ Helps Space Buggy

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“…(S)omething — or someone — had regularly cleaned layers of dust from the solar panels of the Mars Opportunity vehicle while it was closed down during the Martian night.

The cleaning had boosted the panels’ power output close to their maximum 900 watt-hours per day after at one stage dropping to 500 watt-hours because of the heavy Martian dirt.

By contrast, the power output of the solar panels of Mars Spirit — on a different part of the Red Planet — had dropped to just 400 watt-hours a day, clogged by the heavy dust.” Yahoo! News

Suicide mission

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Final Unraveling? “To some military analysts, the fact that a suicide bomber could wreak so much damage inside a heavily fortified Army base suggests that the Iraqi occupation has sunk to a new level of chaos. The war in many parts of Iraq, they say, is apparently so out of control that we don’t even know what we don’t know. The lack of human intelligence is almost total. ‘The situation in Iraq is so confusing that I have no idea what is going on there, and anyone that tells you that they do is not telling you the truth,’ says Thomas Nichols, professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.” Salon

R.I.P. Seymour Melman

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//media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I10957-2004Dec18L' cannot be displayed]Columbia Scholar Spurred Antiwar Movement (New York Times): I consider Melman to be one of the patron saints of the antiwar movement. He transformed opposition to the war with his concept of nuclear ‘overkill,’ his refutation of the simplistic assertions that war is good for the economy and his articulation of a roadmap for conversion of warfighting resources to peaceful uses. Perhaps his most powerful propaganda stroke was helping the public envision defense expenditures by describing them in terms of their equivalents in budgeting for human needs. Let us hope he can rest in peace after more than a half-century of struggling for peace, despite the state of the world…