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Why are you wasting my time?

I've been teaching internal medicine for a number of years now. The practice of internal medicine falls into two broad categories; inpatient medicine, and outpatient medicine. Because of certain historical imperatives, internal medicine training is heavily biased toward inpatient education, and these days, inpatients are sick. To qualify for hospital care a patient must be receiving care that cannot be given outside the hospital; they must meet criteria for intensity of service and severity of illness. Ask any old-timer doc and they will tell you that hospitalized patients are much sicker…

Creationist's Reign Ends in Kentucky

Kentuckians can be less embarrassed starting soon. This from the NCSE ... it's a bit old, but it had slipped past in a flurry of other emails, and I think it is really interesting. FLETCHER LOSES KENTUCKY GOVERNORSHIP Kentucky's incumbent governor Ernie Fletcher (R) was soundly defeated in the November 6, 2007, election, by Steve Beshear (D), a former lieutenant governor of the state, who took 59% of the vote. A Baptist minister, Fletcher was perhaps the most outspoken supporter of creationism to serve as a governor anywhere in the country in recent years. He expressed disappointment about…

Giardia: Protozoan of never ending wonders

... well, OK, maybe that is a slight exaggeration. You know about giardia. Giardia intestinalis. It causes a nasty gut infection, and you get it by drinking water pretty much anywhere in the US (potentially). It is very hard to get rid of. Giardia adapt to immune system attacks (of their host) in a way that passes that adaptation down to their offspring without genes. It is a Lamarkian process. Giardia have no mitochondria, yet many of the genes known to be in mitochondria in eukaryotes are found in the giardian nucleus. So, ancestral giardia probably had mitochondria, but all those…

The Transient Nature of Academia

Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic. Living from place to place, moving until you are in your late 30s, an academic is expected to travel and see the world. You live in various places; experience the day to day hustle of different cities, towns and often countries. You absorb the local customs, the ideas, the history. You attempt to form relationships with coworkers ... but in the end it's all very transient. I've made many good friends…

Entropy Driven Entry

After the death of my computer I decided to take the Chinatown express (15$ buys you a ticket from Boston to Chinatown NYC) and visit some old friends. Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese Scientists living in New York) came over for drinks (and it's was Claudia's 30th). With my veins acquiring the right level of Alcohol I asked several individuals the question. "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" Here is what Edgar told me: Reproducibility. "When I wake tomorrow morning and jump, I will fall back towards the ground." We…

Fish and beer- a nifty trick to dissect scientific articles

There's a really good point that has been brought up many times about scientists. We suck at sharing our results with the public. Or sometimes we share, but in a way that very few people (scientists included) could understand. One of the problems may be a lack of emphasis on the big "So what?" People are much more interested if they understand the relevance of the findings to normal life. I find it helps to relate the concepts to more familiar things in my life. For example, fish researchers from the University of New South Wales recently published a paper on the effects of small…

Why would a leatherback turtle dive 1000m deep?

There are a few theories about why sea turtles make occasional excursions into very deep (> 1000 m) waters of the bathyal zone. These involve escape from predation, thermoregulation, and prey availability. In the first two scenarios, sharks are fewer in deep-water, so turtles can evade predation and "cool off" at the same time. Like ladies tanning on the balcony. In the third scenario, sea turtles are foraging. New research suggests this theory is half-right. We touched on this a year ago during Megavertebrate Week noting the abundance of deep sponges in certain habitats in the comment…

Orcas and Oil

When a scientist is writing a scientific paper we look for that one quintessential figure that tells the whole story. Other figures are ancillary to fill in the specifics but the 'cardinal figure' is where all the meat of the paper is distilled to one remarkable graph. A senior scientist once told me that deciding on and constructing this figure is the hardest part of writing the paper. After the "cardinal figure" everything else writes itself. Think of the "cardinal figure" as manuscript feng shui. An off-balance figure with improperly aligned objects lead to paper disharmony. Bad figure…

Liveblogging Ocean Sciences: Marine Predator Hotspots

I'm reporting this week from the Ocean Sciences Meeting, the annual meeting of the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and The Oceanographic Society (TOS). The first session I went to this morning was on Marine Predator hotspots. There were some interesting talks on megavertebrate distributions, diving behavior and habitat provisioning. D.M. Palacios presented an interesting talk about is groups work on tagging and tracking albatross post-breeding habitat provisioning. They are looking at 2 species who breed together in the tropical Pacific: the Laysan and the Black-…

Right or wrong, or does it matter?

By now most of you will have heard about 1LT Ehren Watada, the army officer who is refusing to obey an order to deploy to Iraq. This is an issue that's getting a fairly large amount of play on the various blogs, and it's stirring up strong emotions on both sides of the political spectrum. (One look at the results of a technorati search on "Watada coward" is enough to show that.) My own feelings are strong, too - strongly mixed. On the one hand, I think that Lt. Watada has made an exceptionally bad decision. He has said that he cannot claim conscientious objector status because he isn't…

A Running Demographic

A recent article in the Utica, NY Observer-Dispatch (sorry, no link) took a look at the changing demographics of the Boilermaker 15k with the assistance of the race's former timer. Here's a quick run-down: In 1985, the average age was 33.5 for men and 30.3 for women. There was a steady increase until 2002 when the women peaked at 34.6 and in 2003 when the men peaked at 39.0 Since then, the averages have been flat, with the men at 38.6 and the women at 34.4 in 2006. So we're looking at roughly a five year increase for the guys and four years for the gals. Breaking this down in terms of age-…

Friday Flippancy: The Verse of the One RNA and Discovery Institute Follies

Gene Expression's Razib used a catchy little title for the article in which he referenced DNA Unraveled by Colin Nickerson for the Boston Globe. How overarching the role of RNA will be for the regulation of gene expression throughout the genome is still up for grabs, but one can't deny that there's fascinating and uncharted territory to be explored. Predictably, the folks at the Discovery Institute leapt all over Nickerson's article as further implication that complexity = Intelligent Design, and the old "scientists don't know everything therefore the theory of evolution is not true" canard…

Hypermiler or Hyperdumb?

Mother Jones has an interesting article this month concerning hypermilers, that is, people who try to get the absolute highest possible fuel mileage out of their vehicles. Lots of folks are concerned about the environment along with high fuel costs, so I figured these drivers might be able to give me a few pointers. Boy, was I wrong. As far as I can determine, this has little to do with environmental responsibility and everything to do with some sort of competition gone awry. Sure, some hypermilers have managed to get very impressive figures out of their vehicles, in excess of 100 miles per…

More press for the godless

Ho hum, I'm quoted in Nature again this week (do I sound convincingly blasé?) It's a short news article on Francis Collins' new book, The Language of God, which I find dreadfully dreary and unconvincing, and I find his argument that "The moral law is a signpost to a God who cares about us as individuals. God used a mechanism of evolution to create human beings with whom he could have that kind of fellowship" to be ridiculously unscientific garbage. Many scientists disagree strongly with such arguments. Some suggest that science is on the defensive today — not just in the United States — and…

Mommy, why is there a War on Christmas?

You've probably been wondering. Who in their right mind would declare war on a family holiday? Who would be crazy enough to think such a thing was actually happening? You might have the impression that it's all a delusion erupting from the fevered brain of blowhard Bill O'Reilly, but it goes deeper than that, back to the 1950s, when the Cold War fostered a whole generation of destructive nuts. Here's a lovely summary of the history of the War on Christmas, which finds its roots in paranoia about Communists: In 1959, the John Birch Society, a far-right organization that sees anti-American and…

The Gender Smog We Breathe: Comics Contribution

I love the comic pages in the newspaper. Some of them are just mildly amusing, but some are bitingly funny and offer real social satire (Pearls Before Swine comes to mind here, as does Non Sequitur). But I was definitely not amused this past weekend when I read the April 19 strip of Foxtrot. In case you aren't able to view the strip: the first panel shows a string of numbers, below which is a key. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a semi-complex mathematical formulation, which must be solved to yield the number, which in turn allows one to substitute letters for numbers in the…

Is Peter a better school Principle?

Scibling Chad weighs in on the discussion between Mark Kleiman and Kevin Drum among others, over whether firing teachers would improve the schools. Kevin wonders whether principals would know enough about teacher performance to know which ones to fire. Kleiman observes that "that discussion leaves out what seems to me the most important fact: For current wages and under current working conditions, there's no ready supply of good teachers to replace those who would be fired if we made firing teachers easier." And Chad rightly notes that: The incompetent teacher trope is one of the standard…

Michael Ruse agrees with Richard Dawkins! The apocalypse is nigh!

I'm feeling a bit light-headed, and wondering if I'm still asleep. Or if it's April Fools' Day. Ruse actually concedes some ground to Dawkins in the religion wars. Of course, it's in the HuffPo, so it could be some perverse nonsense, anyway. Recently, the New Atheists' most prominent representative, Richard Dawkins, wrote a highly emotive piece for the Washington Post, in which he derided the present pope and expressed glee and satisfaction that such a person was now leading the Catholic Church. In Dawkins's judgment, not only was this no less than the Church deserved, but such leadership…

Altruism, and why ID doesn't matter

IDolatrous bloggers ask Is altruism all about cost-to-benefit ratios?, and conclude after reviewing a paper in Science that lays out the current thinking on the evolution of altruism: Of course, there is another avenue for thinking about altruism: but this means going beyond neodarwinism and entertaining the thought that human beings need to be explained not only in terms of law and chance, but also in terms of design. Let's set aside that they never bother to explain how "design" would actually resolve this. That would require some sort of "theory of design," and we all know no such thing…

Drought

One of the measures I use to judge whether someone is a serious thinker in Kansas politics is by seeing where they stand on water policy. It seems like there are drought warnings every summer, and those droughts have let other states leap ahead of Kansas in wheat production – a major part of our economy. This summer looks to be no different: Although the entire state is now under a drought warning, it has been a weird summer with some places inundated with water while others just a few miles down the road remain dry. “We’ve seen some rain showers around the state, but overall it’s still very…

It's a branching process

So the big news finally came out yesterday; Carl and Phil have moved on over to blogs run by Discover (which also houses Reality Base, Better Planet, 80 Beats, Disco Blog). With Jennifer starting up an additional blog over at the Discovery Channel site (which has a collection of space blogs) the past few months have marked an influx of science bloggers into a variety of well-known media outlets. (I may eventually have a similar announcement in the future, but no worries; I'm not going anywhere.) Is all this shuffling and moving to newer digs good for science blogging? Although some people…

Lukewarm review of Expelled in Variety

So far most of the reviews that have popped up about Expelled have been negative, and the creators of the film have increasingly come under fire for plagiarizing cgi-reconstructions of the cell from two sources (even though the company that produced the film has now filed suit, claiming that the accusations are egregious and just part of the "Darwinist machine" trying to keep them down.). A review of the film by Justin Chang on the Variety webpage, however, is more sympathetic; There's an intelligent case to be made for intelligent design, which is why "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a…

Visual and MatplotLib - holding hands at last

(alternate title: how to make pretty graphs in vpython) I am happy. Finally, I can use the visual module in python (vPython.org) and plotting with Matplotlib. Maybe this isn't such a big deal for many of you, but for me, it never worked until now. In the past, I blogged about plotting in vpython vs. matplotlib. My conclusion was that it was easier in vpython, but prettier in matplotlib. So, why not just use matplotlib? There are a couple of things that make vypthon very attractive. Vectors. Vpython has a built in vector class (or function - I don't know what I am talking about). There…

Energy in a hidden battery

Back to the discussion about hiding an electric motor in a pro racing cycle. Before, I looked at a video of Fabian Cancellara to see how his speed and acceleration compare to other bikers. The claim on the internet is that he pulls away so fast that he must have a motor hidden in his bike. Just to be completely clear, I don't think he is cheating. Then why bother? If you ask that then this must be the first time you reading this blog. I welcome you. No, but really, this is what scientists do. How hard would it be to cheat? From my analysis, it seems that a person could ride like he…

Be Less Helpful: The Reddit Version

Here, I am referring to Dan Meyer's "Be Less Helpful" mantra. I like it, but maybe you aren't familiar with Dan. Here is his take on a high school physics problem. Or maybe you would like the video version: Be Less Helpful - CMC North 2009 - Dan Meyer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo. What does this have to do with Reddit? Check out this comment posted in physics. Basically, someone is asking for help finishing physics homework by that night. I really like the following two comments. First, another user said: "This might help you in the short term, or for this course. But it won't in the long…

Backlash? Harming the cause? Where?

Jason Rosenhouse has a short, clear post in which which he briefly exams the polling data to see if New Atheists have harmed the cause of science education, an accusation frequently made. He shows that no, there is absolutely no evidence of such a thing; there may be a trend in the other way, in an increase in the number of science educators willing to say that there is no sign of intelligent guidance in evolution, but he's also rightly cautious to say that there are a lot of variables at play here, so it would be premature to say there is a positive effect. It does seem interesting, though,…

On history

My friend DarkSyde makes an important point: The cliche is, 'we are watching history being made.' But that's not quite it, not tonight, not for us. We are part of making history. We will remember this evening for the rest of our lives. This primary season stretched over months, and hit every state. Every Democrat, and quite a few non-Democrats in states with open primaries or caucuses, had a chance to weigh in. And for the first time ever, we as a party have put forward an African-American as the nominee to be the next president. That's stunning, in its own right. In November, he'll be…

Whining whiners and the whines they whine

Bruce Gordon, "Research" Director at the Disco. Inst. has A Few Words about a Long-Winded Breach of Etiquette, his response to Daniel Brooks's exposé of a Disco.-funded conference. Gordon complains that Brooks's account is inaccurate, but never actually says what he got wrong. He complains that Brooks did not "respect the privacy of the conference and the other attendees by refraining from public commentary until such time as the content of the presentations and transcripts of the Q&A periods were made available and could speak for themselves." But he publishes extensive email…

The Psychology of Hotness

Here's Megan McArdle on our self-perceptions of attractiveness: A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are. You hate photographs of yourself, don't you? A tiny minority of people are terribly photogenic (I recall one girl in high school who was maybe a 7 in person, but a 9.75 in an 8X10 glossy) and like having their pictures taken; everyone else in the world is convinced that they don't photograph particularly well. A cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago explained why to me last…

The Neural Source of Cigarette Addiction

It's an astonishingly robust finding: Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains. What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes sense. The insula has been recognized for more than a decade as a crucial substrate for feeling. It sits at an important neural intersection, and is largely responsible for integrating signals generated by our body - so called "somatic markers" - into mental states. As Antonio Damasio has written (his wife is a co-author on the cigarette paper): "The…

The Secret of Happiness

According to a new study published in the BMJ, the Danish are happier than people in other developed nations because they have low expectations. That's the dismal secret of happiness: not expecting very much from life in the first place. "It's a David and Goliath thing," said the lead author, Kaare Christensen, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. "If you're a big guy, you expect to be on the top all the time and you're disappointed when things don't go well. But when you're down at the bottom like us, you hang on, you don't expect much, and once in a…

Bill Gates Dreams of Robots

If I was a smart man, I'd go out and invest in the stock of some robot companies. Bill Gates (yes, that one) is convinced that the 21st century will be the age of the robot: Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies... But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when--or even if--this industry will achieve critical mass…

Family Life

Benedict Carey summarizes a new UCLA study that documented the life of middle-class families, videotaping their dinners, conversations and leisure activities: The U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat. "This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the…

Intelligence and the Idle Mind

I've written before about the importance of daydreaming and the so-called default, or resting state network, which seems to underlie some important features of human cognition. Instead of being shackled to our immediate surroundings and sensations, the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings and interesting counterfactuals. As a result, we're able to envision things that don't actually exist. Of course, this new research conflicts with the bad reputation of mind wandering. Children in school are encouraged to stop daydreaming and "focus," and…

Spending Money

One question that came up yesterday during the radio show was whether or not Americans can learn, once again, to delay gratification and save money. Can we get back the thriftiness of earlier generations? Or are we destined to be a nation with a negative savings rate? I certainly wouldn't want to underestimate the malleability of consumer habits, or the motivating force of seeing foreclosure signs in your neighborhood, but I think it's worth pointing out that the steep decline in American savings rates coincided with lots of financial innovations that make it much easier for us to spend…

March Madness

Being on book tour means that I watch way too much SportsCenter, since that's what I do when I can't sleep. And so, because it's mid-February, I've noticed that the ESPN anchors are already talking endlessly about March Madness, college basketball and brackets. (Of course, this is also because they have little else to talk about. Football season is over, baseball has yet to begin, and the NBA is mired in its mid-season lull.) What most impresses me about the college basketball analysts is that they act like they're actual analysts, that there's some logical structure to the college basketball…

On Turkey

Various of the lefty blogs are suggesting that we only eat turkey on Thanksgiving because of tradition, and that turkey is actually a tasteless hunk of protein. I must conclude that Ezra, Matt, and the rest of these barbarians are insane. (Though Ezra's braising proposal isn't altogether bad.) Sure, an overcooked supermarket turkey will tend to be flavorless (especially breast meat). But that's why one buys a good turkey, not an abomination. It's why one brines the turkey, and it's why, if at all possible, one cooks it in a Weber grill. None of that propane crap; grilling is all about…

Complex societies = simple languages

At least that was my take home message from a new paper in PLoS One, Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure: Background: Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used. Methodology/Principal Findings: We conducted a statistical analysis of .2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural…

When wealth doesn't matter for height, South Asia & Africa

I was doing some exploring of the effect of a transition to agriculture on human height. Until the past few centuries humans were much shorter than they had been during the Ice Age. In the process I came upon some interesting data. Height, health, and development: Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where…

On linear projections

White Americans' majority to end by mid-century: The estimated time when whites will no longer make up the majority of Americans has been pushed back eight years -- to 2050 -- because the recession and stricter immigration policies have slowed the flow of foreigners into the U.S. Census Bureau projections released Wednesday update last year's prediction that white children would become a minority in 2023 and the overall white population would follow in 2042. The earlier estimate did not take into account a drop in the number of people moving into the U.S. because of the economic crisis and…

How do bloggers keep their day jobs?

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically? Hey, that's sweet to assume we fulfill our primary objectives! Not that we don't try, but to paraphrase Grad Student Barbie, "Research is hard!" (For the record, that's what Grad Student G.I. Joe says, too.) Still, unless one wants to be a full-time blogger who is otherwise unemployed (which I do not), there is balancing required. Here are my strategies: Blogging first thing in the morning or at the end of the day.…

Friday Sprog Blogging: what does the "2" stand for?

Dr. Free-Ride: So, I found a little café table for the back yard. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: A good one, or one that's going to fall apart? Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I made a point of getting a cast-iron one rather than one made of elemental sodium; those aren't so weather-proof. Elder offspring: You know, you still have to figure out a sprog blog for tomorrow. Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, don't worry, we'll start asking you questions in a moment. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: So the sodium's reducing water. Dr. Free-Ride: The sodium's losing electrons, so it's being oxidized, so yeah, it's…

Friday Sprog Blogging: there's a fungus among us.

It's been raining here. A lot. Elder offspring: Remember that huge mushroom we saw on the field after soccer practice? Dr. Free-Ride: With all the rain we've been getting, we've been seeing a lot more mushrooms this spring. Elder offspring: Rainbows, too. Dr. Free-Ride: We should call Uncle Fishy and see if he's interested in going "bird watching" with us this weekend. Elder offspring: Or mushroom hunting. Younger offspring: At school, after rainy days, we have to scrape the mushrooms off of the stumps we sit on in the sandbox. Elder offspring: Mushrooms like rain. Dr. Free-Ride: OK, so…

Easterbrook on Global Warming

In the new Atlantic, the always optimistic Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting take on global warming: it's not inevitable. His logic is historical. Given the ease with which we solved past air-pollution problems (CFC's, acid rain, etc.), we can also figure out how to postpone our warming atmosphere. I'm not entirely convinced, but the article certainly made me a bit less gloomy: Here's a different way of thinking about the greenhouse effect: that action to prevent runaway global warming may prove cheap, practical, effective, and totally consistent with economic growth. Which makes a body…

A few items from the grading bunker

... which is where I've been lately. (But I think of you all often, amidst the stacks of essays.) Once you're a blogger, the mind starts collecting bloggable issues like Post-It Notes. Here are the stickies I've accumulated in the past few days: OK, maybe it's not really economics that bugs me. Can I state for the record that my commenters are some of the coolest folks ever? They responded to my cranky post with careful comments about the nature of actual economics and the difference between the content of economic theory and the free-and-easy "economics" is used in journalism and…

James and Measurement

Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo highlights one of my favorite William James quotes: The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. Notice his emphasis on the inherent unknowability of the mind, the way so many of our thoughts and sensations are constantly falling into the "abyss of oblivion". This was, in…

Neuropharmacology and Scientific Progress

Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made? The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind and brain have made tremendous progress. That is, of course, the correct answer. When you think that, one hundred years ago, Ramon y Cajal had just published his "speculative cavort" laying out the neuron doctrine, or that we still had no effective treatments for any mental disorders (the frontal lobotomy would become popular a few…

Iraq and Loss Aversion

There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right: He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading. And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our…

Britney & Jamie Lynn falsify Steve Jones

Photo credit: AP In light of last week's posts about why human evolution continues, I think it is critical to make concrete the reality of reproductive variance. It seems highly likely now that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant again. This might be a moot point if she has an abortion, though now that the word is out the public relations fall out might reduce the likelihood of that choice. The behaviors and outcomes of the lives of the Spears sisters are in the public spotlight, so let's leverage this into an illustration of evolutionary theory. Last year I wrote Jamie Lynn Spears: it runs in…

Mars Science Laboratory on schedule!

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech I rarely post anything on space because I really don't know much more than the average reader of this weblog; no value-add from me. But yesterday I ran across an article which reported the financial overruns in the Mars Science Laboratory project. Today NASA said that the project will launch on schedule. It seems that to make this work they'll have to ax some other missions, though they're putting a happy-face on their claims today (as if the money will magically appear in these strained financial times!). I'm very happy that the is all-go. Space exploration…