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NASA In Colbert Conundrum Over Space Station
After Stephen Colbert won the vote in NASA's contest to name a new module on the International Space Station, NASA found itself in a tough spot. According to Reuters, "Contest rules stipulate that the agency retains the right to basically do whatever it wants," but it may not be all that easy. At first NASA floated the idea of naming the new module's toilet "Colbert." But Last Thursday Congressman Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., urged the agency to respect the people's wishes. And Colbert turned up the heat on yesterday's weekly show: "So NASA, I urge you to heed Congressman Fattah's call for democracy in orbit. Either name that node after me, or I too will reject democracy and seize power as space's evil tyrant overlord. Ball's in your court."
You have no sense of fun at all.
I'm getting bloody sick of his internet vandalism.
Me too! He should be forced to scrub his vandalism off & return the Internet to its original pure / virginal white.
My pics.
If NASA were smart they would name the thing "Colbert" and encurage the chap to do a "ISS Report" or similar NASA/space oriented report on his show at regular intervals. Keep space research in front of the people. Even to the point of reporting on NASA's own humorous internal mistakes/problems/gaffs with actual data supplied by NASA. National / International attention and it costs them nothing.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I understand why NASA put a clause into the rules stating that it can do whatever it wants... There needs to be a way out in case some yahoos try to name the station something inappropriate, however there is nothing wrong with Colbert. It's one thing to put the literature into the rules to make sure that the name of the new module isn't "Enola Bay" and another thing to just change the name on a whim because a few people at NASA were hoping on "Serenity". Sounds a little petty to me.
Get back to the dungeons of wikipedia where you belong, and don't forget to polish the jackboots from your Fahrenheit 451 Fireman's uniform.
Name the station "Colbert".
The publicity will only do NASA good. It will help popularize space funding amongst an audience of political science students -- and likely future politicians, as well as a whole bunch of other people who simply don't care. Stephen is a friend of NASA, his audience isn't comprised of space geeks on the whole. Having Stephen get them interested in Space is a damned good thing. There is no loss in naming the station after him, no especial advantage in naming it serenity or anything else, but there is a substantial gain in naming it Colbert -- it just makes sense.
Even after reading the article, I still fail to grok what the "tough spot" is. Is it just that they don't want to name it "Colbert"? That's not a tough spot, that's just obstinance.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
NASA should say "I for one welcome space's evil tyrant overlord."
Colbert saved the African elephant from extinction. He did this by virtue of his theory that whatever happens to be on wikipedia represents the truth. He urged his viewers to vandalize the wiki entry for elephants to say that the elephant population had tripled over the last 6 month, so that once it was vandalized it would now be the truth and the elephants would be saved. Here is park of the history of the page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elephant&offset=20060801170519&limit=500&action=history
Actually, he didn't get it named after him. Some country (Hungary, I think) had a contest to name a bridge. Colbert urged viewers to spam the contest with his name, and he won. However, they said they would only use his name if:
1) he could demonstrate he was fluent in Hungarian, and
2) he was dead.
You are retarded.
Oh, dear. I'm afraid your contribution violates our site's policy regarding Neutral Point of View and Verifiability. As a punishment, your account will be suspended for thirty days and you must wash my car.
Flush an effigy of Colbert out the air lock of the ISS and broadcast the event live.
The civil war was about slavery and Lincoln's election, as an abolitionist Republican, arguably precipitated it even before he was sworn in, just like Obama's reputation as a liberal took the market for a nosedive.
For proof:
a) the confederate constitution is a copy of the us constitution, but, with a clause adding that slavery is a natural right and the government cannot ban slavery.
b) the most contentious issue between north and the south, was, in fact slavery. It existed with the infamous compromise in the original constitutional convention, with a series of incidents running all along the 1800's leading up to the civil war - bleeding kansas, dredd scott, the compromises.
c) abolition was the animating social issues of the day.
It's true that there were other issues. The south, being agrarian, favored free trade so they could buy cheaper British manufactured goods. The north was protectionist, and the south saw this as a sort of blackmail. As it is, the north became an economic powerhouse and won the war BECAUSE of its protectionism. This debate continues to this day. Right now the southern and agrarian ideas of free trade carry the day but the thing is, any study of history shows that free trade and a lack of workers rights makes you lose wars. Just ask the south.
But really, the civil war was about slavery.
This is my sig.
Well, you can't very well demonstrate that you are fluent in Hungarian if you are dead. So what they actually told him is "over our dead body". Only in Hungarian.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
This was a billion dollar module meant for serious scientific research and NASA, itself a multi-billion dollar publicly funded institution, had chosen as it's first choice of name, that of a fictional spaceship from some bubblegum space opera made for teenagers, which pays only lip service to scientific fact and theory.
Fact #1: The test airframe of the Shuttle Orbiter was named Enterprise after a write-in campaign by Trekkies. Precedent has been set.
Fact #2: There's no sound in space in Firefly, which is better than 99% of science fiction shows depict. Show some love.
Fact #3: NASA could dearly use a Colbert bump.
Fact #4: Firefly kicked ass. Neer-neer.
NASA should take this ball and run with it. It's lovely and whimsical farce that puts the agency in a mirthful light. One of the ISS astronauts already did a phone-in segment with Colbert. Last January we saw the clip of the Steelers fan up there waving his Terrible Towel in orbit.
This is a win-win sort of thing. Costs nothing, hurts nothing, gives people a smile when they think of a government agency that's gotten more press for fuckups than successes of late. The only kind of person who could be against this is some humorless old shit.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... It doesn't hurt the cause that two of the largest Nasa facilities are in traditionally Republican areas - Texas and Florida.
I think you're confusing cause and effect here. The facilities were located there in the first place, along with the prospect of the industries that would grow up nearby, in exchange for the congressional votes to fund them. (It helps that Florida has the most rotational spin of the continental US, being closest to the equator, but that's just a bonus.)
.)
It's a module, not the whole station. Name it, and take the publicity. Or make sensible rules, like we have for stamps and money, that we only name things for people dead long enough to have stable reputations. (gee, maybe that would help in other contexts as well . .
I think Colber[t] actually pronounces his name as ColberT in private. This is based on me catching him one time on air saying ColberT when there was no comic reason for him to do so. ( I hate saying there's no comic reason for something since there is always the possibility that a joke flew by undetected ) It's unlikely that someone who had always pronounced their name one way would slip, though not impossible.
The name of a pod has no effect on it's usefulness. It's just a freaking name! Being named Colbert or Xenu (which would have been funnier than Colbert) is really immaterial to any science, like studying the effects of weightlessness on Twinkie shelf life, that they do up there.
What's wrong with humor in space? It's part of putting people in space. Humor and satire comes with them.
It's interesting to wonder about who exactly is pissed about a space station module being named Colbert.. Xenu would have been easy to dismiss for religious tolerance reasons, even people who hate scientology may legitimately be offended by someone poking fun at them, but the name Colbert isn't obviously offensive in any way. Yet the offense exists, or there would be no challenge to the nodule being named Colbert. The interesting question is who is being offended?
Serenity seems to have less offense value than Colbert. If it had won on it's own merits, nobody would have objected, and it wouldn't have even made the news. The people who are offended by the nodule being named Colbert aren't offended by Serenity.
I think there are people for whom space is sort of a religion. It's like a girl they've built up in their minds to some ideal that nobody can ever live up to. In their imagination, it has to them all the attributes they need it to have to be their holy land, the place where all their favorite sci-fi stories took place. And mere mortals can't go there - only NASA annointed astronaughts, so nothing ever happens there to destroy their preconceptions of the holy place.
Yeah, it's a girl and a religion. The probes NASA sends are like these folks' dingaling. Naming one of their nodules Colbert is like painting their dingaling pink.
These people need to snap out of it, and a pink dingaling paintjob is just the ticket. When and if people really start to live and work in space, outer space will offer just as many wedgies and swirlies to these people as earth has justly given them. These people need to realise this and work to correct the here and now, and not wait for the prophesised heavenly age of outer space where losers are cool for being losers. Believe me, the folks really doing things in space, aren't these people. They are winners of a game requiring non-loserness. The people these people worship are more like a boy band with a fanbase of stupid thirteen year old girls. These losers are the thirteen year old girls who have gone off the deep end - not the average fan. These losers are the drunken sports fans who paint their hairy chests, backs and beer bellies blue to cheer on their favorite football team shirtless while it snows.
Somehow, these people are being given more importance than they deserve. They are the base, they make the party. NASA uses these devout space-cultists as pillars of it's church. Without them, they'd have no cult. For that reason, NASA is afraid to alienate them. But that's exactly what they should do, since they alienate everyone else.
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Jimmy Doolittle would also be an excellent name for a toilet. Just sayin.
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Oh come on now! The entire point of the show is he's satire of self promoting grandstanding media figures, I have to tell you this? He's also broadcast on cable in the US as well, right after The Daily Show, which he used to on. I think many of the people who don't like Colbert simply think he's being serious, when he's simply being incredibly serious about the satire. Only the court jester can tell the whole truthiness.
nobody's perfect