What kind of American Accent do you have?

This was kind of a fun quiz. Apparently I cannot escape my roots, even after being away for nearly a decade, I guess I still sound like a Minnesotan:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."

What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Going Metric on the Moon - update

So NASA apparently made the official announcement yesterday that we are definitely going metric on the Moon. Space.com also has some comments on the topic.

The funniest thing I found on the internet today

Ever play that game where you add "in bed" to the end of your fortune cookie fortune? This guy has substituted "pants" into several hundred lines of Star Wars dialogue. For example, "These aren’t the pants you’re looking for." Enjoy.

What does the continuing resolution mean for NASA?

For those of you that don't follow the congressional budget on a regular basis, you may not be aware, but last year's Congress failed to do their job, passing budgets only for Homeland Security and the military, the rest of the budget bills were punted for the next Congress to deal with. This is not that unusual, Congress often has trouble completing all the budgets before the end of the year. Some year's (like 2005) they end up lumping everything together into one huge "omnibus" bill that no one has time to read or evaluate, but everyone votes for because they want to go home. Other years they pass a "continuing resolution," or CR, that sort of puts everything on hold until after the holidays, keeping all the budgets at last year's levels until things are sorted out. That's what's happened this year, but the CR expires on Feb 15th and the new congress has decided to do something somewhat unusual, they are just going to extend it until the end of the year, effectively skipping over the 2007 budget so they can get to work on the 2008 budget.

The way a CR works is that it requires that funding be held at either 2006 levels or the level of the President's 2007 request, which ever is lower. This basically maintains the status quo and keeps spending levels down, which in theory doesn't sound so terrible. The problem here is that beyond the simply inflationary increase that we are missing, NASA and most non-NIH sciences were due to get a pretty hefty bump this year thanks to the Vision for Space Exploration and all the Competitiveness Inititive stuff.

This article in the NYTimes gives a pretty good summary of what the current budget delays means for science research and talks about some of the specific projects that are being threatened. There are only two sentences about NASA: "Missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are also threatened, with $100 million in cuts. Paul Hertz, the chief scientist at NASA’s science mission directorate, said potential victims included programs to explore Mars, astrophysics and space weather." I'm not sure where exactly that $100M figure comes from, I assume that's only from SMD (the Science Mission Directorate), not all of NASA, I'm pretty sure the total NASA shortfall is quite a bit more than that, not even including the extra $1B that the Senate was trying to get added to the '07 budget.

My fear is that NASA will compound these science shortfalls by stealing even more from SMD to feed the ESMD Monster (the new Vision stuff). This sort of budgeting is not just a short term problem that can be fixed next year. The truth is that many of NASA's finest scientists are in "soft money" positions. They rely largely or entirely on grant money to feed and clothe themselves. Those grants are becoming harder and harder to get as R&A (research and analysis) funds are drying up. If they don't get grants, they leave the field, and chances are, they aren't coming back. I see up and coming scientists (myself included) realizing that spending more time writing proposals than doing science and constantly worrying about where the next paycheck is going to come from is not really the lifestyle we were looking for when we signed up.

Women, Politics, and Fox News

There is some scathing commentary on Fox new's coverage at News Hounds of Nancy Pelosi's historic swearing in yesterday that I thought was pretty interesting:

"Pelosi does not fit the mold of "fair and balanced" femininity espoused on Fox News: women are either innocent victims, like Natalee Holloway, or they are whores, like the accuser in the Duke lacrosse rape case. Pelosi threatens to upset Fox News entire world view. And that's worse that repealing Bush's tax cuts. "

I'm not sure that this is exactly "fair and balanced" reporting either, but the article does make some interesting points. Like how Fox kept using the banner reading "Congressional Catfight" in talking about Rep. Jane Harman still being upset after Pelosi failed to reappoint her as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. It does really tick me off when a disagreement between two intelligent women is called a "catfight".

Apparently Pelosi referred to herself yesterday as the most powerful woman in America, which Fox and Friends questioned, and there I have to agree with Fox, we all know that Oprah is the most powerful woman in America.

And in a totally unrelated note, was anyone else scared that the tiny little girl (I assume one of Pelosi's grandchilden) was going to drop that baby (I assume one of her other grandchilden) she was barely holding on to as Pelosi was enjoying her photo-op moment with her gavel?

This made me laugh today...

courtesy: http://xkcd.com/c202.html

Going Metric on the Moon

It was announced last month at the 2nd Exploration Conference in Houston that we are going to use metric units on the Moon. This was a big announcement, a decision that was not made easily or lightly, one that will have far reaching ramifications.

Surprised? If you are a scientist, you are probably shocked to hear that NASA is not already using SI units. If you are an engineer, you're probably not at all surprised. And if you are neither, you probably don't think much about units unless you're in Europe and trying to figure out what outfit to wear if the daily high is 23 degrees C.

The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 actually requires (with certain exceptions) all Federal Agencies to use the metric system in their procurement, grants and other business-related activities by the end of 1992 (that's 15 years ago!), and yet NASA is still measuring things in feet and inches much of the time. This act, which ammended the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, was yet another attempt by the Federal government to coax America towards Metrication by leading by example. Unfortunately, it turns out that NASA and it's contractors are just as resistant to change as the rest of the American people.

What is wrong with us? We all know the metric system is better. As a scientist, I use the SI units all the time and yet, if someone asks how tall I am - I'm 5'4", if you want that in meters, I need to get out a calculator. I remember the big push towards metric when I was a kid; my brother and I even had this great board game (Metricat10n) that taught us all the SI prefixes. But it all kinda fizzled out didn't it?

For NASA, one of the issues is the mixing of the two systems. Some things are done in metric, some are still in English units. That can lead to serious problems like the highly publicized and embarrassing loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998 where NASA and most of the contractors worked in metric units but one contractor, Lockheed Martin, provided data in pound force seconds instead of newton seconds. Oops.

I was not party to the discussions leading up to last month's big decision about the Moon, but the rumors I heard suggested that several of NASA major contractors were strongly against metric. Switching is too expensive. Period. If forced, they would do it, but they would only make changes "on the back end" - i.e. they would do everything in English units and then add a line of code at the end that would convert the values into SI. Extra lines of code, of course, add extra risk, something NASA really hates.

I'm very happy that NASA has decided to stick to their guns on this one. I hope the changes are not just cosmetic, I hope they really push the contractors to do more than add code. The transistion may be difficult, but it will be worth it in the long run, it will ultimately be safer, and more efficient, for us, and for our international partners (if we're serious about having them), and for the poor astronaut who only has to carry one set of wrenches when he heads out the airlock to fix that stupid solar panel again.