MAX BOOT WRITES in the Washington Post: “The crew of Columbia gave “the last, full measure of devotion” to this epic voyage of discovery. The best memorial we can offer them is to keep going.”

YOU CAN HEAR MEDBLOGGER ROSS SILVERMAN ON THE BBC at 10 am EST. Here’s a post with more information and a link for online listening.

JOSH CHAFETZ offers a lengthy firsthand report of Gary Hart’s speech at Oxford. Hart gets a mixed review.

UPDATE: TalkLeft differs with Chafetz’s assessment.

IF GEORGE BUSH HAD MADE THIS HISTORICAL BONER, would we read about it in Slate? Will John Kerry get a pass?

JAMES LILEKS ON SPACE EXPLORATION:

NPR had an interview with one of those people who think we should not send people into space, but rely entirely on robots. As I pulled into the parking lot at the mall he casually asked “what can a man do on Mars that a robot cannot?”

PLANT A FUCKING FLAG ON THE PLANET, I shouted at the radio. Pardon my language. But. On a day when seven brave people died while fulfilling their brightest ambitions, this was the wrong day to suggest we all stay tethered to the dirt until the sun grows cold. Are we less than the men who left safe harbors and shouldered through cold oceans? After all, they sailed into the void; we can look up at the night sky and point at where we want to go. There: that bright white orb. We’re going. There: that red coal burning on the horizon. We’re going. And we’re not sending smart toys on our behalf – we’re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we’ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground. His heartbeat will hammer in his ears; his mind will spin a kaleidoscopic medley of all the things he’d thought he’d think at this moment, and he’ll grin: I had it wrong. I had no idea what it would truly be like.

Yes.

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS ON CALLS FOR A NANOTECHNOLOGY RESEARCH MORATORIUM:

The rhetoric is hardly dispassionate. “Today,” it warns, “mighty Goliath (industrial corporations) has learned his lesson and is exploiting the power of small to become mightier still, while little David (society) cannot even see his opponent.”

That might all seem like ignorable fringe-group ranting if ETC and its executive director, Pat Roy Mooney, did not already have a reputation for successfully stirring things up. During the 1990’s, they faced down Monsanto and other chemical giants in a public debate over the ethics of creating genetically modified plants whose seeds were sterile.

And like the manifesto, Mr. Mooney is more often cautiously earnest than shrill. “We are not assuming this is an evil, awful technology,” Mr. Mooney said last week. “I suspect quite a bit can be done that’s useful.” The danger, he said, is that governments and public interest groups do not have enough control over assessing risks and setting priorities.

Well, these guys are rather too green (or at least, too Green) for my taste, but they’re not idiots. It’s worth reading their report (which is linked from the NYT story) together with this paper from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology on nanotechnology and the Precautionary Principle.

I’ve also addressed some of these issues in this paper for the Pacific Research Institute, on regulatory issues in nanotechnology.

UPDATE: Here’s a good story from SmallTimes on the ETC group’s report, and reactions thereto, which are somewhat more negative than the Times story above indicates.