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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (47877)	5/31/2004 2:49:37 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Science - AP Planet Venus Will Cross Face of Sun By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer NEW YORK - Ben Franklin watched it. Sousa named a march after it. Crowds jammed the sidewalks of New York to see it in 1882. But nobody alive today has ever seen the silhouette of Venus crawl across the face of the sun. On June 8, that sky show — astronomers call it a transit of Venus — will return for the first time in 122 years, visible from much of Earth. Thousands of schools and hundreds of museums have set up special programs, and tours to good viewing sites have been booked. Even people who don't want to leave their homes will be able to follow a live Webcast from Greece. All this to watch a black dot inch across the lower part of the sun. It takes six hours. "It's kind of slow and boring," says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History. However, he said, Venus transits carry "incalculable" historical significance. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these events let scientists probe what one contemporary called "the noblest problem in astronomy:" determining the distance from Earth to the sun. That in turn could be used to figure the distances to all the planets. Though that problem was eventually solved with precision by other means, the Venus transits produced the first relatively solid estimates and inspired international scientific efforts and rivalries. It was "the 19th-century equivalent of the space race," said Steven Dick, chief historian for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. So, Tyson said, watching a Venus transit nowadays is like linking up to history by visiting a historic site. "I think you can bask in that," Tyson said. "I will." What's more, a lot of people just want to see something nobody alive has seen before, said Roger W. Sinnott, a senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. His magazine has three tours going to Italy, he noted, and the first sold out in 24 hours when it was offered last August. There's a good reason for interested Americans to go to Europe. The western United States won't be able to see the transit, and the rest of the country will be able to see only the last couple hours or less, starting at sunrise. The entire six-hour event will be visible from Europe, the Middle East and most of Asia and Africa. Viewers won't need a telescope or binoculars, but scientists warn against looking at the sun without adequate eye protection, just as with a solar eclipse. During the 1882 transit, amateur astronomers on the streets of New York City sold peeks through their telescopes at 10 cents a shot, noted Sten Odenwald, an astronomer at NASA (news - web sites)'s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The transit became a theme for parties, and it made the front pages of newspapers. The prospect of measuring the Earth-sun distance made Venus transits a big deal for scientists as well in the 18th and 19th centuries. The idea was to make detailed observations from far-flung places around Earth. Using that data, scientists reasoned, they could do geometric calculations to get the answer. Scientists carefully observed the four transits from 1761 to 1882. The first — which revealed that Venus had an atmosphere — was studied by observers who'd dispersed to 117 posts around the world. Captain James Cook viewed the 1769 transit from Tahiti. In 1874, Russia launched 26 expeditions, Britain a dozen and the United States eight. France, Germany, Italy and Holland sent out parties of observers as well. Technical problems made it impossible to gather highly precise data. But William Harkness, director of the U.S. Naval Observatory, concluded in 1894 that Earth was about 92.8 million miles from the sun. By then, more accurate methods of determining the distance had arisen, and scientists soon adopted a slightly different value that owed little to Venus transit observations. Today the distance is known to be 92.96 million miles. Harkness is still remembered for his poetic reflection on the upcoming event. In 1882 he noted that it would occur when "the 21st century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004." The next Venus transit after the upcoming one, by the way, will appear when the June flowers are blooming in 2012. ___ On the Net: sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov exploratorium.edu

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (47877)	5/31/2004 3:16:21 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 89467

Chalabi? Bush message about choosing friends hits the mark WASHINGTON -- So let me get this straight: We ransacked the house of the con man whom we paid millions to feed us fake intelligence on WMD that would make the case for ransacking the country that the con man assured us would be a cinch to take over because he wanted to run it. And now we're shocked, shocked and awed, to discover that a crook is a crook and we have nobody to turn over Iraq to, and the Jordanian embezzler-turned-American puppet- turned-accused-Iranian spy is trying to foment even more anger against us and the U.N. officials we've crawled back to for help, anger that may lead to civil war. The party line that Paul Bremer was notified about the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's house after the fact is absurd. The Iraqi police, who can't seem to do anything without us, were just proxies. We were going after the very guy who persuaded us to go after Saddam, the con man the naive neocons cast as de Gaulle; the swindler who sold himself to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Spartacus. One diplomat from the region grimly cited an old Punjabi saying: "It's very bad when grandma marries a crook, but it is even worse when she divorces the crook.' Chalabi's wealthy family was swept out of Iraq in a coup in 1958, and he spent much of his life plotting a coup to take back his homeland, a far-fetched scheme that took on life when he hooked up with Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, who had their own dream of staging a coup of American foreign policy to do an extreme Middle East makeover. The hawks dismissed warnings from their own people like the Bush Middle East envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni that the Iraqi National Congress was full of "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London.' As Zinni told The New York Times in 2000: "They are pie in the sky. They're going to lead us to a Bay of Goats, or something like that.' The CIA and State Department, too, grew disgusted with Chalabi, even though State paid his organization $33 million from 2000 to 2003. Cheney & Co. swooned over Chalabi because he was telling them what they wanted to hear, that it would be simple to go back and rewrite the Persian Gulf War ending so that it was not bellum interruptus. The president and his hawks insisted that only a "relatively small number' of "thugs,' as Perle told George Stephanopoulos last month, were keeping the country from peace. Perle said the solution was "to repose a little bit of confidence in people who share our values and our objectives ... people like Ahmad Chalabi.' The neocons still think he can be Churchill. On Thursday, an Iraqi judge, Hussain Muathin, also lamented the actions of "a small number of thugs.' But he was announcing warrants for the arrest of thugs around Perle's own George Washington, Chalabi henchmen suspected of kidnapping, torture and theft. Didn't we sack Saddam to stop that stuff? Now we're using Saddam's old generals to restore order reversing the de-Baathification approach that Chalabi championed while Chalabi snakes around like a bus-and-truck Tony Soprano, garnering less trust than Saddam in polls of Iraqis. A half-dozen dunderheads who thought they knew everything assumed they could control Chalabi and use him as the instrument of their utopian fantasies. But one week after getting cut off from the $335,000-a- month Pentagon allowance arranged by his neocon buddies, he glibly accepts the street cred that goes with bashing America. And he still won't give us all of Saddam's secret files, which he confiscated and is using to discredit his enemies. Going from Spartacus to Moses, he proclaims to America, "Let my people go' even as he plays footsie with the country that once denounced the United States as the Great Satan. On Friday at Louisiana State University, President Bush told graduates: "On the job and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you and that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In my job, I got to pick just about everybody I work with. I've been happy with my choices although I wish someone had warned me about all of Dick Cheney's wild partying.' Bush thought he was kidding, but too bad he didn't get that warning before Dick Cheney took the world on such a wild ride. CC