Titan Movie

With virtually no public awareness, much less fanfare, the Cassini mission to Saturn continues to return excellent science — day after day after day. Today there’s a new movie of Titan, the intriguing giant moon of Saturn. If you click on the picture at right, you’ll get the large (6MB) GIF movie. It was taken in a combination of the visual and infrared spectrums:

From the official Cassini-Huygens site:

This movie of Titan shows data taken with Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer during the last three flybys of Titan. The flybys took place on Oct. 28, 2005, Dec. 26, 2005, and Jan. 15, 2006.

These false-color images were taken at wavelengths of 1.6 microns shown in blue, 2.01 microns in green and 5 microns in red.

The viewing geometry of the December flyby is roughly on the opposite hemispheres of the flybys in October and January. There are several important features shown by the movie. First, the globe of Titan exhibits two major types of terrain. One is very bright, and a darker one seems to be concentrated near the equator. Titan also has two very bright regions, the large one known as Tui Reggio, and the other as Hotei Arcus. These regions are thought to be surface deposits, probably of volcanic origin, and may be water and/or carbon dioxide frozen from the vapor. The December flyby data show that the western margins of Tui Reggio have a complex flow-like structure consistent with eruptive phenomena. The reddish feature at the south pole is Titan¿s south polar cloud system, which was very bright during the December flyby. During the October and January flybys it is barely visible, indicating that the atmosphere over titan’s south pole is very dynamic.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona.

It’s just amazing what this “flying Volkswagen” is doing!

Michelle vs. the Rabbits

For the past few days, my blog has had many more visitors than usual, thanks mainly to a link from Michelle Malkin to my post (along with posts from many other bloggers) of the infamous Danish cartoons. In addition, search engines (especially Yahoo, for some reason) have also referred many visitors to that post. Obviously the controversy over the cartoons has generated a lot of interest in the subject.

But this morning when I looked at my blog’s visitor statistics, I see that things are back to normal after the blogburst over the cartoons: rabbits are on top. Specifically, rabbit photos. People keep finding (usually through Google Image searches) two posts I made last summer (here and here). For months (except for the past few days), these pages have been the number one reason why visitors come to my blog.

And this morning, they’re number one again.

Sigh.

But on a happier note: a big, hearty “Congratulations!” to Michelle Malkin: she will be getting the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute’s Woman of the Year Award on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. And a tip of the hat to the Institute for making such a great choice…

Lamestream Lies

Reading the news this morning (my usual practice, with a cup of wonderul Pannikin Kenya AA coffee in my hand), I came across this startling headline and lead paragraph:

From the (consistently lame) Washington Post: Libby Testified He Was Told To Leak Data About Iraq

Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff testified that his bosses instructed him to leak information to reporters from a high-level intelligence report that suggested Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to court records in the CIA leak case.

Now from all I think I know about Libby and Cheney, this is a most unlikely story. So I read on, until I got to the key part:

In a letter written in January and released in court papers filed by Libby’s defense Monday, Fitzgerald wrote that Libby testified that his “superiors” authorized him to disclose information from the National Intelligence Estimate to reporters in the summer of 2003.

Just in case it’s not obvious to you what the WAPO has done, let me spell it out. Libby (presumably in response to someone’s request) sought authorization from his bosses (including Cheney) to release the answer — from the already declassified National Intelligence Estimate. There’s no smoke and no fire here, folks — that’s just a bureaucrat doing his job. And the WAPO attempting to twist that into something sinister.

Their headline clearly implies that Libby testified that he was told to deliberately leak some information, presumably for political reasons. But when you look at what he actually testified to, you find that it was something else altogether. This is exactly the sort of thing that occurs when a reporter’s own political agenda runs into the facts: the facts get twisted, stretched, and distorted so that they fit into the reporter’s preconceived notions — and hardly resemble reality any more. You really have to work at it to find out what really happened, instead of what the reporter wants us to believe happened…

How lame is that?

Classic Democrat?

Not to be found on the news anywhere (of course) is this story: former Congressman Robert Livingston (Louisiana) was asked by his Democratic colleagues to join them in criticizing President Bush for exercising too much power in the war on terror — and he refused:

Via (the excellent and essential) PowerLine:

... I have always considered you as a good friend, and I continue to do so. But since you raised it, I must tell you … I am emphatically on the other side of this issue.

The President of the United States is the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces. He is Constitutionally obligated to do everything possible in time of war to safeguard the American People. This tempest in a teapot about treatment of cowardly un-uniformed mass murderers and terror mongers, as well as restriction of his ability to monitor conversations of potential terrorists is in my view asinine, and I will have nothing to do with any effort that might be used to undermine his ability to keep us free from terrorism.

Indeed, we are at war with a most formidable and intractable enemy. He is insidious, cowardly, and bent on the destruction of all civilized society. Innocent men, women and children are cannon fodder in his eyes, and efforts such as the one you are sponsoring will be unappreciated by practitioners of his cause. This effort would have looked insane in Lincoln’s day, and he was far more intrusive in his practice than anything that has been envisioned today. Frankly, some Members of Congress and self-appointed leakers in the Executive Branch have put this country in grave danger with this very discussion. I have seen no evidence at all that American citizens have had their Constitutional 4th Amendment rights infringed upon (as they were in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon eras). Until such evidence is shown, I shall do nothing to keep this President from protecting American citizens from harm’s way.

PowerLine doesn’t say where they got the copy of the Mr. Livingston’s response, but given its complete absence on the news, I assume one of their readers sent it along.

Isn’t that response just magnificent?

But isn’t it sad that only Livingston, Miller, and Lieberman — out of the entire federal Democratic establishment — understand that the nation’s security is more important than partisan politics?

This leads me to an idea, though… I’d love to see the three of them spearhead a new national political party: the “Classic Democratic Party", as opposed to the “New Democratic Party” of Pelosi, Kennedy, Schumer, Daschle, Reid, Clinton, and Carville. It would be so nice to have a real political debate with serious Classic Democrats such as these three men — and I would worry a lot less about the consequences of a Classic Democratic electoral victory than I do about the consequences of a New Democratic electoral victory…