james_davis_nicoll | Mar. 30th, 2012

Mar. 30th, 2012

Canada’s chief electoral officer is rejecting any attempts to play down the extent of the voter-suppression tactics in the last election, expressing his outrage for the first time in public about fraudulent robo-calls made in the name of his impartial organization.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Marc Mayrand told a parliamentary committee. “It’s totally unacceptable in a modern democracy.”

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3682434.html

Do I need a warning if it's just the first half of the N-word?

Have fun speculating on what word Republicans will claim Santorum caught himself before saying.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3682788.html

Margin saving cut

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Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3682847.html

And one more. This one frankly astounds me.

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Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3683283.html

To provide a realistic baseline on what is possible, the student was asked to constrain his design to commercially off-the-shelf technology. The mission involves taking a 12 m diameter radio telescope beyond 550 Astronomical Units (AU), continuing outward thereafter, to examine the gravitational lensing of our own Sun. A secondary mission, which occurs before that point, is to measure the magnetic fields, particles, and dust while traveling through our Solar System and the transition through the edge of our Solar System (the termination shock, the heliosheath, heliopause) and into true interstellar space.

[I]t is found that this mission could be performed with EXISTING technology for roughly $3B-$5B (FY 2011 dollars), and that it would take roughly 34 years to reach the edge of our Solar System, and roughly 110 years to reach its primary mission point of 550 AU, and continuing thereafter for almost 80 years of data taking until the spacecraft reaches about 1000 AU, where it will have likely exceeded its 2-century life-time projection.