Virgin Galactic has been working on Spaceship 2 for over a decade. It is a descendant of the Scaled composites Spaceship 1, a design by the legendary Burt Rutan which won the Ansari X prize in the early 2000’s. It will be carried to a height of 50,000 feet above mean sea level, then released for launch. This approach has many advantages over a launch from the ground as it requires a much smaller rocket booster and makes the climb out of Earth’s gravity well gentler. It will then change shape into a form that Rutan called “feathered” and return like a badminton shuttle cock. The blunted side of it facing the atmosphere. It will change shape again and glide to the runway much as the space shuttle did.

Critical Race Theory is a reasonable curriculum according to a new business item from the representative assembly of the National Education Association. Some are taking this to mean teaching real academic CRT in like kindergarten or 6th grade.  This is not an unreasonable mistake, but it is likely based on a fundamental misunderstanding.  The NEA also represents college professors in addition to K-12 teachers. Furthermore, the things that people are worried about, “teaching White kids to hate themselves”.  That is not what anyone is saying should be done at all.

Through two observations that match theoretical expectations for a Black Hole neutron star merger humanity can now place limits on how often these occur.  About once per month within a one billion light year radius of the Earth Black Holes and Neutron Stars merge.  We do not seem to see any from any from inside our own galaxy.  If we did the signals would be stronger.

Universities trying to teach a curriculum full of performative equity and inclusion are failing their students. Something which will cost Black and Brown people in the long run.  The way to teach about the intellectual diversity of humanity and to include all humanity is to just give an honest global accounting of it. That would include real diversity and equity.

Cornell University's accreditation should be called into question for having offered a course called “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos.  I cannot begin to put into works how vacuous this is.  One would compare it to the region inside the Schwarzschild radius of a Black Hole except that contains a lot of mass and energy.  The only conceivable excuse for this would be if woke students somehow got the idea that astronomy was “colonial” or based on White supremacy.

Right now, the cotton in the clothes you are wearing may have originated from slave labor of the Uighurs of Xinjiang (not) Autonomous Region of China. The Chinese Communist Party puts out propaganda which shows happy smiling dancing Uighurs. People happy to be relocated to “reeducation” camps where they must speak Mandarin Chinese and not their own quite different language.