Majorityrights Central > Category: Science & Technology

I don’t care to nurse my politics all day long.  Nope, once or twice in my day some opportunity comes along that lifts the spirit a little.  Here’s a prime example, courtesy of NASA and Nature.com.  Not that NASA isn’t political, you understand.  Sending minority equal-people into space is nothing if not political.

But none of that Shuttle stuff comes into play with the pure research goals of the Mars Rover programme ...

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“It was a gamble to go to Victoria,” he says. It was so far away that Opportunity was quite likely to run out of steam before it got there. “We decided to drive as fast as we could.”

Why is this crater worth such a dash?

It’s big. It’s deep (70 metres). It’s wide (800 metres). Other craters investigated by Opportunity have been small fry in comparison. The depth of the cliffs means that more layers of rock are exposed and so a longer geological history can be probed than before. The bottom is at least a billion years old, say researchers.

The rover has ventured out on to a rocky point on the crater’s rim and now has a panoramic view of the nearest cliff face.

What is Opportunity looking for, specifically?

The rover has a number of instruments on board: a thermal emission spectrometer will probe the rock layers to discover their composition, an alpha-particle spectrometer will give information about the elements, and a Mössbauer spectrometer will work out the abundance and composition of any iron-bearing minerals. Opportunity doesn’t have a way to age the rock, although the deeper it gets the older it will be.

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The prospects are great for ecologically imposed patriarchy enhancing the fertility of whites via oceanic frontiers.  The majority of the earth’s surface remains not only uncultivated, but not biologically productive despite the presence of adequate sunlight and near-adequate nutrients. If recent experiments in iron fertilization of high nitrogen low chlorophyll oceanic surface regions are any indication, the primary ingredient lacking is the pioneering spirit that led to the cultivation and increased carrying capacity of the Anglosphere’s frontier territories: The United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.  It is reasonable to expect that the Anglosphere alone could increase its numbers by a factor of 10, relatively unmolested by multicultural supremacists, during this pioneering renaissance and maintain if not improve the quality of their populations.  Other, less sea-faring European peoples could enjoy smaller but nevertheless profound population and territorial relief.  Moreover this population increase could be very rapid if the fertility rates of the United States frontier is any guide.  This is a prospect that seems plausible in no other way short of world war.

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Today’s Telegraph alerted me to a survey of leading scientific thinkers conducted by The Edge website.

John Brockman, the New York-based literary agent and publisher of The Edge website posed the question: what is your dangerous idea? in reference to a controversial book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett that argued that Darwinism was a universal acid that ate through virtually all traditional beliefs.

Brockman received 116 responses to his challenge from Nobel laureates, futurists and creative thinkers. These were among them

This one from Craig Venter, Genomics Researcher and Founder & President, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, is a real breath of fresh air:-

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A little good news is needed now and then. The pioneer spirit is still alive. As a person somewhat responsible for the resurgence in technology prize awards, I have a few things to say about Burt Rutan’s capture of the Ansari X-Prize by being the first to fly a man to space in a reusable craft twice within a week. He follows the great technology pioneers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both of whom came to prominence during similar fair contests: The Guggenheim Trophy and Orteig Prize respectively. (From these exemplars some might now see a reason the powers that be shy away from fair contests—contests where they can’t really control who wins the prizes—and it was left to an Iranian family, the Ansaris, to fully fund the X-Prize.)

A speech by Burt Rutan before the National Space Society is worth a view (requires QuickTime ). He repeatedly and angrily declares his embarrassment at the risk averse culture that has strangled the pioneer spirit since the feats of the 1960s—nearly 40 years ago. I’ve got my issues with his speech but we clearly agree that something went horribly wrong with the pioneer spirit subsequent to the 1960s. The turning inward of the human potential has resulted in the halting of human progress upward and outward with aerospace technology being bureaucratically and monotonously scaled up for jumbo jet transportation. The result is the sort of danger warned of by Charles Lindbergh in his 1939 Reader’s Digest article “Aviation, Geography, and Race”: a sea of humanity threatening our race which is, after all, a global minority. Indeed the technological exemplar of this era has been driven by the rise of finance to preeminence—the inward-turning microelectronic revolution. The unintended side-effect of this revolution you see before you now as a website, but it is small consolation for the damage to our pioneer spirit.  As we were warned by Henry Ford the great struggle of the 20th century was creative industry vs global finance.  Global finance has dominated the past 30 years or more. Perhaps men like Burt Rutan can lead us out of our malaise and realize the human potential.  If so it may be due to prize awards like the Ansari X-Prize that give men even younger than Burt Rutan a chance to make a name for themselves purely via their own grit and gifts.

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A fascinating story that complements Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy in 1871 has appeared in the press today.  To quote from Nasa’s pre-press announcement:-

The location of Greek hero Odysseus’ homeland - the island of Ithaca described in the poet Homer’s Odyssey - is a mystery that has baffled scholars for nearly 3,000 years. Now this ancient enigma has been solved with the help of World Wind, NASA’s 3D planetary visualisation tool.

The site of Homer’s Ithaca has been identified by Robert Bittlestone, Chairman of the UK management consultancy Metapraxis, whose quest was motivated by combining his company’s experience in the visualisation of complex data with a lifelong interest in Greece and the classics. He has solved the problem with the help of James Diggle, Professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University, and John Underhill , Professor of Geology at Edinburgh University.

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So science has pronounced.  The final, seemingly unanswerable question has apparently been answered.  Woman and her mystique lies bared beneath the detached, indeed pitilessly disinterested gaze of, to all intents and purposes, androgenous scientific enquiry.

The varying ease with which women reach sexual climax is more heavily influenced by genetic factors than any other, British scientists have found. Inheritance outstrips the contributions made by upbringing, culture or male bedroom skills.

The study of almost 1,400 pairs of female twins revealed that genes affect arousal at least as strongly as they do medical conditions in which their role has long been established, such as hypertension, migraine and depression.

It also suggests that the elusiveness of the female orgasm is evolved, probably because it confers a reproductive advantage that is triggered only with a particularly desirable partner ...

... “The theory goes that if a man is considered powerful enough, strong enough or thoughtful enough, in bed or in the cave, then he’s likely to hang around as a long-term partner and be a better bet for bringing up children,” Professor Tim Spector, of St Thomas’ Hospital in London, who led the research, said.

“Women who orgasm too easily might be less good at selecting partners.”

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Derbyshire considers the causes of homosexuality in his recent piece for NRO.

I’ve got an interview with Greg Cochran on the subject up on my blog.

A short time ago in this forum I was inspired by some recent reading to make a longish comment on the “Race Does Not Exist” (RDNE) debate. My own views on this are that this issue is too important to be left to experts who should be on tap, not on top. Also the issue is not wholly a scientific debate and the scientific view should be welcome but is not the deciding factor. The reading that has got me going is the Jay Klein and Naoyuki Takahata book mentioned below and “The Restitution of Man: C S Lewis and the Case against Scientism by Michael Aeschliman.

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