James Maynard's Blog

My own radio station!

2006-09-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

OK, this is a little silly, but I just set up my own radio station on Yahoo Music.

Check it out. it has some of my favorite music on it. I have a feeling it is not going to be seriously giving WNEW a run for its money any time soon, but here we have it...

http://music.yahoo.com/launchcast/station.asp?u=1245496445

JM

Can they do it?

2006-09-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

I am never one to give up hope that the Red Sox can come back from anything until they are eliminated. Almost. I still had hope after game two of the 2004 ALCS, but lost it after three. I still watched, just to get in the last game of the year and... they came back. OK, I was wrong there and happily so.

NOW, of course, they are nine games back in the division and six and a half games back from the wild card. There's three games left to play (starting today) against the wild-card-leading White Sox and four against the hated Yankees.

Can they do it? Yup. They need to pick up about a game a week and sweep either the NYY or the Chi Sox, unless they are hoping for either to fall apart in the next four weeks.

Will they do it? Hard to tell, but even with the recent injury to Jonathan Papelon, getting Manny, Ortiz, Nixon, Tek, and A-Gon back in the lineup and on the field can help a lot.

NEVER count them out until the last game is played...

JM

Six down, thirty-seven to go...

2006-08-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

OK, that 5-game loss to the Yankees hurt. A lot.

However, there are still 37 games to go, including four against George SteinVader's Evil Empire. At 6 1/2 back now, that means IF the Sox can catch up by 2 1/2 games in the next month, they could take the lead in the standings in September during that series.

It can happen. Keep the faith, fellow Sox fans.

JM

Al' Queda has a friend in George Bush

2006-06-15T09:46:00.000-07:00

Hmmmm....... Bush has been saber-rattling for weeks now about Iran and how they are "running out of time" to stop their nuclear program.
Of COURSE Al' Queda wouldn't want that... or would they???
A new document uncovered reportedly says that a war between the U.S. and Iran is exactly what they want...

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/15/D8I8NEB80.html

First, they knock down the Twin Towers, then Shrub sends all of Osama's family out of the country (at U.S. taxpayer expense!), then he goes after Saddam, leaving Osama free to cause havoc, and now he's playing right into the hands of the world's most dangerous terrorist.
Nice job.

JM

Ro-ro a No-go

2006-06-02T18:41:00.000-07:00

Roger Clemens has decided to re-sign with the Astros. I suppose it is good for him family-wise, but what about history? The Astros are in fourth place in their division, and they stand little chance of getting into the playoffs, much less playing in, or winning, the world series.
No records broken, no number retired, no challenge faced, no history made. He has taken the easy path and will fade away, another great pitcher going into the sunset, slowly fading from baseball.

JM

Roger Clemens coming back to Boston?

2006-05-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

For months now, baseball fans in Boston, NY (Yankees), Texas (Rangers) and in Houston have been waiting to hear whether Roger Clemens, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, has decided to play again and for whom. The four teams mentioned above seem to be the only teams on which he is willing to play.
Well, the latest news/rumor says that Roger HAS decided to pitch again and that he has narrowed his choice of teams to Boston and Houston, according to an "unnamed source close to Roger."
It may only be a rumor, but coming to Boston would give Clemens the near-certainty to become the all-time winningest pitcher on the team (only one victory left to beat Cy Young), plus have his number (#21) retired at Fenway. He is certainly going to be in the Hall of Fame in a Boston uniform anyway, where he began his career. The Astros (now in 4th place in their division) offer Roger little but convienence, as he lives in Houston.
But if Roger wants to make history, and if he wants to become the best pitcher ever on a perrenial contender, PLUS have his number retired, there is only one choice:

Come back to Boston, Roger!

JM

Coco's back!

2006-05-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Coco Crisp is back in the lead-off spot for the Boston Red Sox today.
After playing very well in only five games at the start of the season, and becoming injured, he returns where he belongs.
Good luck Coco! Welcome back!

JM

Where Dan Goldin Went Right (and Wrong)

2006-05-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Now, I’m never one to praise most former or present government officials, but even in the race of the slow, somebody must win.
Landing on the Moon is perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of the human race to date. How did they do it? During the 1960s, NASA was not run by people with doctorates in sciences, nor by government-first bureaucracy types, nor by people who wanted to please the current administration at the cost of science. The agency was run by people with bachelors degrees, with a sense of achieving the impossible and a refusal to take no for an answer. But after the glory days of Apollo, NASA quickly fell into bureaucracy, redundancy and lassitude.
The Shuttle program, once meant to launch craft every two weeks at a relatively low cost, became only a faint shadow of the original dream. Each shuttle became able to launch only once ever two years or so. The tragedy of the Challenger explosion showed that NASA was now launching by political priority and not scientific goals.
In 1992, the agency was taken over by someone who had a vision of a space administration without the usual huge budgets and modest results. His motto was “faster, better, cheaper,” and for a while, it worked. It was during his tenure that NASA repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on Mars (and broadcast its live video images 750 million times around the world), and managed to fly more craft to study Earth than had been planned at half the projected cost. Goldin had a goal of reducing the time it took to produce new spacecraft two-and-a-half times, launch four times as many missions, all while reducing the cost of new missions by two-thirds. He reduced the size of NASA by 1/3 and contractors by half, without the use of forced lay-offs. For years, Dan Goldin’s leadership made NASA truly “faster, better, [and] cheaper.” One-hundred and sixty out of one-hundred and seventy-one missions under Goldin were successes. The National Journal stated that Goldin was “a brilliant visionary who brought NASA back from the brink of a black hole."
But, just like trying to feed granola bars to cats, a healthy diet for private industry didn’t work for long within the confines of government. The Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander spacecraft were lost at the red planet in a quick one-two during the Autumn of 1999 that would knock out Goldin’s leadership. The overt causes were simple - in the case of the Climate Orbiter, just a mathematical error in converting from English to metric units. But there was another reason, as well: political expediency. In an interview with Donna Shirley published on Space.com in January, 2000, the former JPL manager stated: “Originally the whole Mars Surveyor program talked about flying orbiters to recover Mars Observer science. The plan changed because NASA Headquarters decided that politically it would sell better if we had a lander as well as an orbiter on each opportunity. If we had flown two orbiters, they could've been carbon copies of one another, which would've saved a lot of money and reduced risk.”
However, the losses gave those who saw financial responsibility as a scapegoat for failure a reason to latch onto Goldin’s small-government philosophy as the cause of the spacecraft losses. Never mind that this same idea gave NASA its greatest days in twenty-five years, since this was government, someone had to take the blame. Hence, Goldin stepped down in 2001. So does “faster, better cheaper” work? Yes. But not in government.
Just twenty-five years ago, home computers were lucky to have 16k of memory. Now, even RAM memory in computers or digital camera cards the size of postage stamps can contain over sixty thousand times as much information. Sure, it works in computers, but could it also work for spacecraft? The answer here is also yes. In the Fall of 2004, for around twenty million dollars, Burt Rutan and his companies, Space Development Corp. and Scaled Composites, designed, built and flew Space Ship One. With this craft, they were able to do what NASA has never been able to do: fly the same spacecraft into space twice in less than two weeks. This was the original goal of the Space Shuttle, never achieved by the government organization.
Goldin was a voice of reason and success within government, but Rutan made the dream come true. If Goldin is looking for a new project, he may be well advised to work with Rutan on private planetary exploration, funded by philanthropists. I want to see what’s out there, and I am not willing to wait for government to do it.