are we walking to Mars?

April 2010, Obama was lying through his teeth talking to NASA employees, hoping to bamboozle them into voting Democrat, no doubt, in the midterm elections. From the BBC:

Barack Obama says it should be possible to send astronauts to orbit the planet Mars by the mid-2030s and return them safely to Earth. The US president made the claim in a major speech to staff and guests at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He was laying out the details of his new policy for the US space agency.

Forget the moon, says Obama! We're aiming for a Mars mission! So, imagine my surprise to read this today:

In its budget submitted to Congress on February 13, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for NASA’s future Mars-exploration missions. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, currently en route to the Red Planet and the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2013, will be sent, but that’s it. No funding has been provided for the Mars probes planned as joint missions in 2016 and 2018 with the European Space Agency, and nothing after that is funded either. This poses a grave crisis for the American space program.

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source:
Proof Positive: WTF Without NASA, Mr. President? - Saturday, February 18, 2012

The joy of statistics

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
The Joy of Stats
BBC Four

More about this programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l
Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.