Coming to a sky near you...Perseids Meteor Shower

Perseids Meteor Shower

August 12th, 13th 2009

The Perseids is one of the best meteor showers to observe, producing up to 60 meteors per hour at their peak. This year's peak occurs on August 13th and 14th, but you may be able to see some meteors any time from July 23rd - August 22nd. The waning gibbous moon will provide some interference in the early morning, so the best viewing will be in the evening before it rises. The radiant point for this shower will be in the constellation Perseus. Look to the northeast after midnight.

Toy rocket

Ask This Old House

How to Build a Water Rocket

Host Kevin O'Connor and a middle school teacher show some eager students how to build a model rocket launcher using commonly available household and hardware store items.

Video

Alternate:

Water rockets are easy to build and fun to play with. Rockets demonstrate science concepts such as air pressure and equal and opposite reactions. There are many good water rocket web sites with various levels of complexity. This is a simple water rocket plan.

Safety:

Safety is very important with any rocket. Rockets are safe when everyone understands and abides by safe behavior. Children need to be closely supervised when they are using rockets. Even if they understand and agree to the safety rules there will be lapses in concentration or judgment. Children cannot be made responsible for the safety of others. A child may feel it is enough to tell a two-year old to stay out of the way.

Water rockets should never be pointed at another creature or object. Water rockets take off with force from the air pressure and weight from the water. This simple water rocket with a rubber stopper does not blastoff with as much force as more elaborate water rockets that have release mechanisms but I have not been willing to intercept one myself to see how bad the damage would be. After the bottle has lost water it is light and safer. Be careful at blastoff time and do not walk in front of the launcher. It would be fine to station people out in the field to catch the bottles as they fall.

At times the rocket will not take off and will spray water around the rubber stopper. The bottle is pressurized and will blast off when you touch it. Be careful and do not let it hit you. This is the situation that kids need to understand or they will stand over it and get hurt.

2-liter bottles can weaken and explode. This is less of a concern for rubber stopper bottle rockets because the pressure is not high before the rubber stopper gives way. We have never seen a bottle explode with the rubber stopper rockets. Safety glasses should be worn for higher pressure water rockets.

Materials:

Bicycle pump: A pump with a pressure gauge is nice but any bike pump will do.

Valve stem: The valve stem prevents the water from going into the bicycle pump. (Sources: Automobile tire centers remove these when they dispose of tires and can give you some. Bike shops may have old inner-tubes with valves.)

Plastic tubing - inside diameter 1/4". 1 to 6 feet. (Sources: Sears Hardware, American Science and Surplus, Home brew shops.)

Flexible copper tubing - 1/4" diameter. 1 to 2 inches. (Sources: Plumbing or Hardware stores.)

No. 3 black rubber stopper, 1-hole or plain. (Sources: Sears Hardware, American Science and Surplus.) The black rubber stoppers are softer than other stoppers and stay in longer.

Waterproof glue such as epoxy or contact adhesive (we used a Sportsman's GOOP brand)

Hacksaw or pipe-cutter

Utility scissors or knife

2-liter bottle.

Launch pad.

Build the water rocket:

Children will need some assistance.

If the rubber stopper does not have a hole drill an approximately 1/4" hole.

Cut the copper tubing with a hack saw or pipe cutter to a length of 1 or 2 inches.

Put glue around the copper tube near the end but make sure it does not clog the opening. Fit the copper tube into the rubber stopper hole in the fat end of the rubber stopper. Work it in by twisting it and rocking it back and forth.

The plastic tubing gives the operator some distance from the rocket. This adds safety and keeps people dry. Put glue around the other end of the copper tube. Fit the plastic tubing over the copper tube and work it up to the bottom of the rubber stopper.

Adults should do this part. Trim the rubber on the valve stem to fit the plastic tube. Tough shears such as linoleum cutters work. It can also be trimmed with a knife. Put glue around the trimmed end of the valve stem keeping the opening clear.

Fit the valve stem into the plastic tube.

Let the glue dry overnight.

Build a launch pad:

Launchers can be as simple as a couple of bricks. The rocket goes farther if it has something solid to push against (this may help the rubber stopper stay in). Our launchers were two pieces of wood connected with a hinge. This allowed us to easily adjust the angle of the launch. We then cut another bottle or waxed box so that the mouth of the bottle would not get snagged and glued or screwed it onto the board.

Launching the rocket:

Fill the bottle about 1/3 full of water. Fit the rubber stopper firmly into the bottle. Place the rocket in the launcher. Attach the bike pump to the valve stem. Put on the safety glasses. Make sure everyone is clear and the rocket is aimed safely. Pump! If the rocket does not blast off be careful. The rocket is pressurized and will take off when you jiggle it.

Rocket Science:

Try the rocket with different amounts of water and air. A rocket with just air does not go far. Add a cone to the nose of the rocket and see if it goes further.

Rockets demonstrate Newton's Laws of Motion.

1. Objects at rest will stay at rest and objects in motion will stay in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

The rocket rests on the ground. Gravity forces the rocket down toward the center of the earth. The earth holds the rocket up and balances the gravitational force.

The bicycle pump compresses air in the bottle. The compressed air pushes against the sides of the soda bottle and water. Finally the rubber stopper is pushed out and the air and water can escape from the opening.

Air pressure in the bottle is unbalanced when the rubber stopper gives way . The pressure against the side walls cancel each other out. Pressure is released through the opening of the bottle when the stopper pops out. The pressure at the top of the bottle is unopposed and pushes the bottle up. Another site (I will credit if I can find it again) had a very good analogy of unbalanced forces and escaping pressure. Imagine a herd of excited (under pressure or hot) children (molecules) in a box that is missing one wall. When a child bounces off a side wall the box moves to that side. Another child bounces off the opposite side wall and moves the box back where it started. Children leave the box through the opening rather than bounce against the wall. The force against the opposite wall is unbalanced and the box moves away from the open wall.

2. Force is equal to mass times acceleration.

3. For every action there is always an opposite and equal reaction.

Water adds mass to the rocket. Without water the rocket does not go far. The momentum of the water (mass and velocity) expelled from the rocket causes and equal and opposite thrust in the direction the rocket is pointed. Thrust is force at takeoff and depends upon the speed and the mass of the water escaping the bottle. Higher air pressure causes greater thrust.

At blastoff the rocket has maximum force but is not moving very fast. The rocket accelerates as the water escapes.

Transfer of momentum can be visualized as people on ice skates (this eliminates friction as a factor). One of them is a bully and likes to push other people. If the bully pushes someone lighter, the bully will slide backward some but the victim slides forward farther and faster. If the bully picks on someone her own size she moves back the same amount that the victim moves forward. If the bully picks on someone larger (showing a lack of brains as well as manners) she moves back farther and faster than her victim moves forward.

Rockets demonstrate Aerodynamics.

Drag is the air resistance a rocket experiences. Adding a nose cone can reduce drag. When geese fly in a 'V' formation the lead goose does more work then the geese behind it. A nose cone cuts the air and parts it more efficiently then the flat end of the bottle.

Jupiter collision photo by Hubble

Updated photo from Hubble.


Jupiter collision...July 2009

"Gaia"--metaphysics?

Lisa Hunt

Is it philosophy or science--a warm, fuzzy metaphor: "It is not silly to think of the world as an organism. After all, every year it goes through phases of growth, flourishing, yielding its fruits, and then withering and dying." Is this simply a naive and primitive metaphysics?

"Gaia in the Light of Modern Science"

by

Michael Ruse

July 20th, 2009

The Chronicle of Higher Education

For many years, I taught an introductory philosophy class based on Plato's Republic. It is a wonderful work through which to bring students to some of the crucial issues that engage and divide human beings—the nature of knowledge, the desirability of democracy, the place of women in society, mathematics, and God. Above all, there is the Theory of Forms, extrasensory entities that are supposed to inform and determine the objects in this world of sensation and experience. They are Plato's answer to the challenge posed by two earlier thinkers: Heraclitus, who claimed that everything changes ("You cannot step into the same river twice."), and Parmenides, who claimed that nothing changes ("How could what is perish? How could it have come to be?"). The Forms are timeless and yet manifest themselves in this physical world of corruption and decay.

Others intent on the same ends as I was might have chosen different works by Plato, but I suspect that few if any would have seized on Timaeus, a rather odd dialogue (at least to us) in which Plato argues that the world is a giant organism fashioned by a God, the Demiurge. Today it's hard to imagine that in the early Middle Ages, until Thomas Aquinas and others discovered the attractions of Aristotle, Timaeus was the only known work of Plato. And very influential it was, too, as almost everyone in the early centuries of the last millennium agreed that the world was an organism of a kind. Hence, as with all organisms, it was appropriate to think of the world as having sensations and feelings, and also to ask questions about ends and purposes.

The coming of Aristotle did not stop that mode of thought—indeed, he emphasized that such end-directed thinking (what he spoke of as final-cause thinking) is an absolutely vital tool for understanding the world around us. As Carolyn Merchant, a professor of environmental history at the University of California at Berkeley, showed in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row, 1980), even at the beginning of the 16th century, on the verge of great changes in our understanding of the world, it was considered appropriate to give thanks when, in order to extract minerals, miners cut into the earth—cut quite literally into our mother. It was thought necessary to respect the earth for what she was and what she gave. Crass misuse of her bounties was sinful.

At the same time, one could ask questions about the world that were (as with organisms) couched in terms of ends. Just as we might ask about the purpose or function or end of the eye, so we might ask about the purpose or function or end of (let us say) rain. And answers were forthcoming: The eye exists for sight. Rain exists for the growth of crops.

It is not silly to think of the world as an organism. After all, every year it goes through phases of growth, flourishing, yielding its fruits, and then withering and dying. In their fascinating new biography, James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia (Princeton University Press), the science writers John and Mary Gribbin introduce us to a man who endorses this metaphor with much enthusiasm.

The British-born Jim Lovelock (as they call him) is someone with a deservedly high reputation as a scientist. Although trained as a chemist, for many years (thanks primarily to the demands of the Second World War and its aftermath) he worked on biological and medical questions, investigating such matters as the spread of the common cold, a problem which involves the physics and chemistry of small particles as much as anything strictly organic in itself. By the early 1970s, that research had earned him a Fellowship in the Royal Society of London. Around that time, however, Lovelock broke from conventional science, having become convinced that the earth is a living organism. To this hypothesis, drawing on a suggestion by his neighbor—the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding—Lovelock gave the name Gaia, referring to the Greek goddess of the earth.

Gaia has gone through various formations and definitions—in his less-than-enthusiastic book this year The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton University Press), Peter D. Ward, a professor of paleontology at the University of Washington, traces several variations. Unfortunately, Lovelock himself is not always terribly helpful about the precise nature and content of his own claims. His latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Basic Books, 2008), is not the place to start looking for answers, since it seems to be little more than clippings from the floor of a long career. Better to go to some of the earlier works, perhaps the first full declaration, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press), first published in 1979, although Lovelock had gone public with the idea in articles at least five years earlier.

Speaking of the new perspective on ourselves of looking at the planet from outer space, Lovelock writes:

We now see that the air, the ocean and the soil are much more than a mere environment for life; they are a part of life itself. Thus the air is to life just as is the fur to a cat or the nest for a bird. Not living but something made by living things to protect against an otherwise hostile world. For life on Earth the air is our protection against the cold depths and fierce radiations of space.

There is nothing unusual in the idea of life on Earth interacting with the air, sea and rocks, but it took a view from outside to glimpse the possibility that this combination might consist of a single giant living system and one with the capacity to keep the Earth always at a state most favorable for the life upon it.

Things are kept in balance because when something occurs to shift the natural order of things, then other things occur to compensate, bringing one back to the original state. Seizing on the fact that the earth's temperature remains pretty constant, despite the increase over the years of heat from the sun (25 percent, the Gribbins tell us, from the beginning of life on earth), Lovelock looked for, and found, the necessary feedback mechanisms. For instance, volcanoes produce carbon dioxide; as carbonic acid, it becomes part of the rock-weathering process and eventually ends up on the sea floor; in turn it is taken up by primitive organisms like algae; through evaporation it gets whipped up into the clouds, giving the earth cover from the sun; and so the earth cools; and on we go, cycle after cycle.

What we have here is a homeostatic system a notion that was popularized in the 1930s by the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon, although those with longer historical memories will find the idea remarkably reminiscent of the Victorian man of science Herbert Spencer's concept of dynamic equilibrium. The Gribbins claim Charles Darwin as a precursor to that kind of thinking, but I find their argument most unconvincing. Darwin was never into balances of nature and that sort of thing. He saw change as continuing and profound. To go back to our Greeks, whereas Gaia is Parmenidean, Darwinism is Heraclitean.

Of course, it is not only in that sense that Lovelock is out of tune with modern science. Picking up the story at the end of the Middle Ages, in the time span from Copernicus, at the beginning of the 16th century, to Newton, at the end of the 17th century, something major happened in what was then known as natural philosophy. The idea (the metaphor, if you like) of the world as an organism was increasingly rejected in favor of the idea or metaphor of the world as a machine. To cite the title of one of the greatest histories written about the period, by the Dutch historian E.J. Dijksterhuis in 1950, minds turned to The Mechanization of the World Picture.

Why did the new perspective triumph? Why did people want to drop all of that organiclike, end-directed thinking and focus instead on blind law, working with undeviating regularity? There is no great mystery here. It was not some violent repudiation of God. Copernicus was a minor cleric who died in good standing, and Newton, for all that he may privately have doubted the divinity of Christ, was an ardent—one might say obsessive—believer in a deity. The machine metaphor triumphed because it led to a science that more readily exhibited the values that scientists hold dear—Newtonian physics was more predictively fertile, more consistent, more unifying, more everything than Aristotelian physics. With the new physics you could explain and do things simply impossible with the old. A weapon maker could calculate the trajectory of a cannonball; a lens maker could work out the best kind of optical apparatus; a chemist could start to understand why certain combinations of elements work and others do not, saving valuable time and materials when making alloys.

The machine metaphor may have been regarded by the Aristotelians as akin to an Egyptian plague—there are those today who think likewise, especially the so-called "ecofeminists" who argue that we abuse and rape our dwelling place—but the current of thought did not sweep through overnight. At the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant notoriously declared that there would never be a Newton of a blade of grass, meaning that a machine-based picture could never fully capture the organic world. But in the 19th century, Darwin, thanks to his mechanism of natural selection, showed how organisms are subject to unbroken, unbending laws. Richard Dawkins, who has a gift for these sorts of phrases, spoke of organisms as "survival machines." And then, as the 20th century drew to an end, many believed that cognitive scientists had finally extended the machine metaphor to the human brain and its thinking abilities. We were invited to think of brains as the hard drives behind our thoughts—computers made of meat, said the computer scientist Marvin L. Minsky.

There have long been attempts to resuscitate the claim that the world is an organism. The most ardent were those by the German Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century—known as the Nature Philosophers, or Naturphilosophen—who included the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the anatomist Lorenz Oken, and the greatest advocate of all, the philosopher F.W.J. von Schelling. But generally, although those people often did good science, however you judge it, such attempts came to naught. The organic metaphor did not work as well as the machine metaphor. Indeed, the enthusiasm of the Naturphilosophen, and more particularly of their modern-day successors, does show why it was as well that, before Lovelock took up the organic metaphor, his fellowship at the Royal Society was already in hand.

To say the least, initial reaction to the Gaia hypothesis was not overly enthusiastic. Or rather, in respects, initial reaction was even worse than that, because the theory was enthusiastically embraced by the wrong people—joss-stick-burning, Eastern-religion-embracing, herb-consuming (eaten and smoked), Birkenstock-wearing, now-aging hippies and New Agers. Respectable scientists shunned Gaia. The notable exception was the American biologist Lynn Margulis, a professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of a brilliant hypothesis about the hybrid nature of complex cells (eukaryotes) from simple cells (prokaryotes). She is the exception that proves the rule. Not only is she someone with her own well-merited reputation for going against the mainstream—initially her cell hypothesis was derided and denied—but her thinking is deeply holistic in an organic way, seeing parts coming together to make living wholes that function only as complete systems and not as blind mechanisms built out of disparate bits and pieces.

Although I don't think of Gaia as in any sense a religious hypothesis—neither Lovelock nor Margolis promotes that cause—I can see the attractions for someone who thinks that a good God designed this earth of ours. Lovelock was for a time close to Quakerism, and, although he has moved on, he certainly has the holistic reverence for creation that one finds in that religion: "that of God in every person."

In science, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), niceness is not enough. There were some telling hits on the Gaia hypothesis. Scourge of all things sloppy—especially those with the odor of the quasi-spiritual—Dawkins, in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection, argued that organisms are produced by natural selection, which requires reproduction, variation, and a struggle for existence. There is no reason to think that the earth has been produced that way, hence no reason to think of it as an organism. To which Lovelock (who did, to his credit, take the criticism seriously) responded (in books like The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, first published in 1988) that, on the one hand, he meant the organism talk in only a loose, metaphorical sense (which may have gotten him off the hook but made his claims rather less interesting), and on the other hand, for him the chief mark of life is homeostasis (which may have satisfied the physiologists and Spencerians but left the evolutionists and Darwinians a lot less than happy).

In major part, however, the objections to Gaia were more philosophical than scientific, echoing the earlier critics of Aristotelian thought, like Francis Bacon and Descartes. Thinking of the world as having ends, of volcanoes as having functions (spewing out carbon dioxide), goes against the spirit of modern science and is not very helpful. The argument that Gaia is unfalsifiable was also trotted out, starting with a letter published in Nature in 1990 from James W. Kirchner, an earth scientist at Berkeley, who has leveled this charge repeatedly. Again to his credit, Lovelock took his critics seriously. (Whatever you might say, this is a man who gives science the respect it deserves.) He came up with the "Daisyworld" model. Suppose you have a planet covered in flowers: black daisies that absorb the sun's rays but that like the cool, and white daisies that reflect the rays but that thrive in the heat. As the sun warms up, thanks to the black daisies, the planet gets warmer. Then the white daisies increase in number and reflect more rays back into space; the planet starts to cool. Eventually a kind of equilibrium is achieved. There is no strange teleology; no weird forces bringing the end about; all is mechanical. Yet there is homeostasis.

Critics have not been convinced. Ward, in The Medea Hypothesis, argues bluntly that our planet is not a Daisyworld. Drawing on his experience as a paleontologist, he says the history of the earth and its life suggests that there are violent fluctuations—especially mass-extinction episodes—and no evidence that the earth then returns to anything like equilibrium. Indeed, he argues (and that gives him his rather overly cute title, which refers to the character in the Euripides play who killed her children) that life is, in a sense, poisonous and carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For instance, again and again microbes in the sea have produced vast quantities of carbon dioxide, leading to violent changes of temperature here on earth, a consequent lack of oxygen, and mass deaths. There is nothing particularly homeostatic about any of that, even though there may have been rebounds to eras of very different flora and fauna.

I was surprised not to find some discussion by Ward of the work of the late J. John Sepkoski Jr. A paleontologist with sophisticated computer skills, Sepkoski spent much of his career mapping the rise and fall of groups of organisms, suggesting that it was less the external environmental influences that led to, say, the rise of flowering plants, or angiosperms, and more the ecological dynamics caused by the inventive exhaustion of certain organic forms and the arising of different forms that could create and take advantage of new niches. (The point being that there is only so much you can do with four legs. You need a new adaptation, like wings, which now let you exploit the air.) In a sense, Sepkoski's work seems not to fit comfortably into either a simple homeostatic model or one of violent death and destruction. Although he was well attuned to the brutal episodes in life's history, Sepkoski saw organisms as the ultimate determinants of this history. All of that, at a minimum, suggests that the true, overall picture may be more complex than either Lovelock or Ward suggests.

Lovelock and his critics agree that we cannot just go on as we are going on. The world in which we live is changing in a dramatic fashion, warming at a frightening speed. That is true whether because we have upset Gaia and taken her beyond her abilities to regenerate naturally, or because a Medea effect has kicked in and we are on the way naturally to another crash of the earth's life forms. We must do something.

Ever the discomfiting maverick, Lovelock himself is scathing about many of the proposals to replace our dependence on fossil fuels. Windmills in particular make him scornful; even with nonstop gales, we can achieve but modest gains. For him it is nuclear power or nothing. James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia has a jolly picture of him and his wife, in white coveralls, touring a French nuclear station. Ward is more inclined toward orbiting sunshades that would cut down on the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. Positioned over the oceans, they would reduce the growth of gas-producing micro-organisms. All a bit gloomy for sailors, one would think.

My sense is that Gaia has made an important contribution to our thinking about the planet, if only by virtue of the fact that it makes us think seriously about such issues as global warming and pollution of the oceans. As a historian and philosopher of science, I find that both Lovelock's theory and those of his critics inspire me to go back to the foundations of science and consider the root metaphors of empirical inquiry and why we prefer one set of models and ideas over another. It is true that as Gaia has been tamed (by Lovelock himself) into a more respectable notion in the light of modern science, it has lost some of its original dramatic appeal. No doubt those earnest Californians seeking spiritual backing for their enthusiasms will find other outlets.

As a Darwinian and a Heraclitean (and an ex-Quaker shunning his childhood roots), I confess that I am uncomfortable with balance and equilibrium, those Parmenidean conjectures. Although books like Ward's The Medea Hypothesis—so obviously written for the trade market, so selective in the evidence they use to make their case —make me no less uneasy. Perhaps in the end, Plato had it right: We need both perspectives, Heraclitean and Parmenidean, to get the whole picture. At our peril, and at our children's peril, we ignore the messages of those seminal Greek thinkers.

James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia

by

John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin

ISBN-10: 0691137501
ISBN-13: 978-0691137506

Element #112=Copernicium [Cp]--maybe

A few months to wait for a definitive name and the debate continues.

"Element 112’s Likely To Be Called Copernicium"

by

Mitch Jacoby

July 16th, 2009

Chemical & Engineering News

What's in a name?

That all depends on who's doing the naming. In the world of heavy-element synthesis, the folks at GSI, the Center for Heavy-Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, have done a heck of a lot of element naming. To date, they’ve come up with five monikers. Now they’re working on number six. The GSI team headed by Sigurd Hofmann just proposed to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC, the official keeper of chemistry names) that element 112 should be called copernicium and abbreviated Cp. The team decided to name the element in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus, the radically forward-thinking 16th century astronomer who, in GSI’s words, "paved the way for our modern view of the world," by figuring out that earth orbits the sun, not the other way around. IUPAC has to give its stamp of approval for the name to become official. That process might take about 6 months.

The Darmstadt group has already had the pleasure of dreaming up names for elements 107 (bohrium); 108 (hassium); 109 (meitnerium); 110 (darmstadtium); and 111 (roentgenium). The group actually discovered element 112 some thirteen years ago. But IUPAC officially confirmed their discovery just a few months ago.

For fun, after learning that IUPAC gave the nod to GSI for discovering element 112—and the privilege of naming that superheavy element, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry World blog invited readers to propose names of their own for the short-lived bugger.

Readers had a field day. They came up with helvetium, emergencium, darwinium, zlatan, terrorismus, fibonaccium, and bloodymindium. One reader suggested ledzeppelinium, "because it's a heavy metal" the entry said. Which reminds me… Almost 25 years ago when I worked for the chemistry department at Cleveland State prepping the undergrad analytical lab, I set out a waste-collection bottle labeled "for heavy-metal types like Zeppelin, Sabbath, and AC/DC." Besides the T.A., maybe two kids found it funny.

I kind of like the ledzeppelinium idea. But copernicium certainly has a nice ring to it. Anyhow, as one of the other Chemistry World bloggers noted, "Anything's better than ununbium."

A discussion among chemists...

Copernicium?

Element 112..."copernicium"?

American Chemistry Council fights a proposed Seattle plastic bag fee

Why is the American Chemistry Council against this proposal? Granted, twenty cents is a bit steep but surely a compromise can be established.

"American Chemistry Council gives $500,000 to stop bag fee"

The American Chemistry Council's latest contribution of $500,000 to the campaign against Seattle's proposed 20-cent fee on disposable shopping bags is one of the city's largest ballot-measure donations in recent history.

by

Marc Ramirez

Seattle Times

The American Chemistry Council has provided $500,000 to help fight Seattle's plan to charge consumers 20 cents for disposable shopping bags.

Adam Parmer, spokesman for the campaign to turn back the Seattle ordinance, said the money given over the weekend will pay for radio ads and direct-mail efforts against Referendum 1, which goes before voters Aug. 18.

It's the single largest contribution to a local ballot-measure in recent history, according to Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission staff.

The money comes from the Progressive Bag Affiliates of the Virginia-based American Chemistry Council, the prime backers of the Coalition to Stop the Bag Tax, which last year gave the campaign about $239,000.

The campaign began placing anti-bag-fee ads on the Internet over the weekend, Parmer said, and radio ads should start airing this week.

Mayor Greg Nickels proposed and the City Council approved the bag fee to encourage the use of reusable bags and reduce waste. The ordinance was put on hold when opponents gathered enough signatures to put the measure to a public vote.

If voters approve the ordinance, Seattle would become the first U.S. city to target plastic and paper.

Backers of the ordinance said their opponent's cash boost does not alter their plans.

"It's what we were anticipating from the outset," said Rob Gala of the Seattle Green Bag Campaign, which has so far raised about $65,000. "We see that this vote is essentially about one of the world's largest polluters telling a city what it can and cannot do in terms of waste reduction."

The $500,000 deposit is the largest to a Seattle ballot measure in at least a decade. It exceeds two donations of $400,000-plus in 2006 to Seattle Citizens for Free Speech from strip-club operators who fought successfully to repeal the city's strip-club ordinance.

Still, the anti-bag-fee campaign's total of nearly $750,000 falls short of the Free Speech campaign's total for 2006 of $861,000, as well as the anti-monorail Yes on I-83 campaign's total for 2004 of $892,000.

Apollo astronauts complain

I expected nothing less from "space cowboys".

"Apollo astronauts bemoan state of U.S. space program"

by

Irene Klotz

July 21st, 2009

Reuters

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida--The U.S. investment in the Apollo space program, which landed men on the moon, paid off handsomely, unlike the $100 billion plowed into the International Space Station, Apollo's pioneering astronauts said on Monday.

"We opened the door to future of exploration by touching down on another body," Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, said at a press conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

The United States staged six successful missions to the moon between 1969 and 1972, then developed the space shuttles and later, the space station.

NASA is finishing construction of the station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, and plans to retire the shuttle fleet next year. After that, the United States plans to pay Russia to ferry crews to the outpost, which orbits 225 miles above Earth.

"We've spent a lot of money up there for almost nothing. It's almost a white elephant," Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell said. "Until we can really get a return on our investment on that particular project, then it was money wasted."

The United States spent about $25 billion, in 1969 dollars, on the Apollo project. The investment, which consumed about 4 percent of the federal budget, was returned many times over, the astronauts said.

"We now seem to think it's too much to put 0.6 percent into the NASA budget," said Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham. "That is idiotic in my opinion."

"The investment that we made back in the 1960s was paid back. You got the return on the investment for the next 30 years. It was a driver of technology that really helped make us the leading, driving economic force of the world," he said.

"What are we doing today, what investment are we making today that will ensure that we have that kind of return for the next 30 years? I don't see it out there," he added.

COMPELLING GOAL NEEDED

What's lacking, the astronauts say, is an inspiring goal, a motivating force, such as what the objective of landing on the moon did for the Apollo initiative.

"To me, exploration is going someplace that you haven't been before," said Aldrin, who would like to see NASA move on to Mars, rather than leading a return to the moon.

The current plan, developed in the wake of the 2003 Columbia accident, is for NASA to complete the space station, return astronauts to the moon and eventually move on to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.

President Barack Obama, who met with the astronauts at the White House on Monday, said NASA would continue with its "inspirational" mission.

"It's fair to say that the touchstone for excellence in exploration and discovery is always going to be represented by the men of Apollo 11," he said in the Oval Office. "You inspired an entire generation of scientists and engineers that ended up really sparking the innovation, the drive, the entrepreneurship, the creativity back here on Earth."

A presidential panel is reviewing options for the U.S. human space program and is expected to issue its recommendations next month. A National Research Council report released last week suggested NASA programs mesh more closely with national economic, environmental and strategic goals.

"The only way to have people glued to their TV sets is to have an accident ... or do something that is really different," Lovell said.

The astronauts' comments came six days into space shuttle Endeavour's 16-day construction mission to the station.

On Monday a pair of spacewalking astronauts spent the day stashing a spare cooling system pump, antenna and other gear outside the station. The equipment is needed to keep the outpost operational after the shuttle fleet is retired.

"I want to see the space station have a return on our investment. I think it can," Lovell said. "We've done a lot more with the Hubble Space Telescope, which I think has been one of the greatest triumphs of the space program."