Private space flight finally takes off

The successful launch, and subsequent docking with the ISS is the starting point of a new era in the human exploration of space. And this week Virgin Galactic got FAA approval to start testing their Spaceship Two for suborbital flights.

Private space flight is finally starting to "get off the ground" and I can't wait for it to start catching on. The prices involved for a private space flight is still out of reach for most, but given that people up until now has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to escape earth the $100k that Virgin Atlantic is charging doesn't seem that bad. And keep in mind that when commercial flight started earlier in the last century it was also only available for the very well off. I would be actually be surprised if the prices hadn't come down to a more reasonable price level that I could afford before I get too old to try the experience and me for one can't wait.

Space exploration is the only way to ensure the long (Granted extremely long) term survival of the human race and I hope that we will get started with more ambitious colonization of our solar system soon. By any luck we'll have both permanent moon & Mars bases before the next century comes along and hopefully a couple of asteroids that we can mine for minerals that are rare on the surface of the earth. I also hope by then we will have a space elevator constructed somewhere which will make leaving the earth gravity well no more complicated than taking a train ride is today.

Even though the first tiny steps taken these last few weeks might seem small I hope for all of ours sake that it is the beginning of a new push for humans to start exploring the world outside our little blue marble that we call home and this time driven by commercial interests instead of national pride because commerce will always be there while national pride comes and goes. It is tragic how it was almost 40 years ago since the last human placed it's feet on another celestial body, let's hope it will not be too many decades before we are aiming outwards again and this time lets hope we don't stop!

Really cool all in one BBQ tool

Check out this simple yet brilliant all in one barbecue tool. All I can say is: Mind blown!

You can get it now from Quirky

Cool visualization about how much water there is on Earth

Did you think most of the Earth was water? Think again!

Check out this really cool visualization of how truly minute amounts of water there is on our little blue green globe. And if we start talking about fresh water there there is so little of it, it might as well be a rounding error.

Source Gozmodo

How do you fix education when 70% of 4:th graders are failing writing?

How do you fix your education when 70% of your 4:th graders are failing their writing tests? In Florida they decided to make the test easier to pass instead of actually teaching kids how to read and write properly. Even though I am not a parent reading things like this just makes me sad. I'm pretty sure kids today aren't more stupid than previous so something else must have changed, but this is not the way to fix it.

First step to gene therapy against aging

According to this article researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre has successfully tested a gene therapy on mice that caused the life span of the mice to increase by up to 24% from a single treatment at adult age. I hope this translates to humans soon enough for me to make use of it.

You should be careful collecting rocks on the beach?

If you ever collect rocks from the beach this weird story from Gizmodo. A woman just collected a few rocks from the beach down in San Clemente and as she was walking with them in her pants pocket they spontaneously caught fire.

What's wrong with US Politics: Part 4, The electoral college

The electoral college is an old throwback to when it was tricky to count votes over such a populous and dispersed country as the USA. It allowed each state to elect a set of people that would travel to the capital and cast the actual vote for the president. There are many problems with this, the obvious one is that the president isn't actually elected by gaining the most amount of people to vote for him. In fact a president could be elected with almost as little as 25% of the vote (Highly unlikely obviously). Other problems with the electoral college is that different states have different number of delegates per votes. For instance Rhode Island has 4 delegates for roughly 1 million people (1 delegate per 250 thousand) while California has 55 delegates for roughly 38 million people (Less than 1 delegate than 600 thousand).

The cool thing about this problem is that this might actually already be on the way to be solved by the Popular Vote Compact that is already adopted in many states. The whole idea is that once enough states to represent more than 50% of the electoral votes have joined the compact all the states under the agreement pledge that all their electoral delegates will vote not to the winner of the states election, but to the winner of the popular vote. Since each state's legislator can decide how its delegates should be assigned this can be done without any change to the US constitution (Although most states would need to change their constitutions). The last state to join the compact was California and with this 132 of the needed 270 electoral votes have been pledged to the compact so we are already almost halfway there.

If you live in a state that has a very strong bias to either the right or left this is good news for you. Until now your voice has been largely ignored during the presidential elections since usually all delegates in a state goes to whoever gets more than 50% in the state and since the state already has a strong bias the money and effort to win your state is better spent in other states that are more closely contested. With the compact however, every vote counts the same regardless of which state it comes from so all of a sudden a vote converted to Republican from Democrat in California is worth as much as one in Texas. If you are from a populous state you will also get more say given that today there are a lot less votes per delegate in smaller states than larger states and with the compact every vote will count exactly the same.