🚀 go-pugleaf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQfXUk7w
"Minister: (rising) Mr Pudey, (he walks about behind the desk in a
very silly fashion) the very real problem is one of money. I'm afraid
that the Ministry of Silly Walks is no longer getting the kind of
support it needs. You see there's Defence, Social Security, Health,
Housing, Education, Silly Walks ... they're all supposed to get the
same. But last year, the Government spent less on the Ministry of
Silly Walks than it did on National Defence! Now we get  348,000,000 a
year, which is supposed to be spent on all our available products. (he
sits down)."

Sad news indeed. More sad news:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml;sessionid=K1U0KTMW3ZXT3QFIQMFCM5WAVCBQYJVC?xml=/connected/2004/04/28/ecfgravb28.xml
"Last week, an American probe began an 18-month mission to put
Einstein's prediction to the test, 90 years after he unveiled his
ideas in Berlin. Gravity Probe B was blasted into space from the
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a Boeing Delta 2 rocket and
will orbit the Earth for more than a year. The $700 million joint
mission between Nasa and Stanford University, conceived in 1958, uses
four of the most perfect spheres ever created inside the world's
largest Thermos flask to detect minute distortions in the fabric of
the universe.....Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, said: "The
project's a technical triumph, and a triumph of the persistence and
lobbying power of Stanford University. But its gestation has been
grotesquely prolonged, and the cost overruns have been equally gross.
I recall hearing a talk about the project from Francis Everitt
(principal investigator) when I was still a student - and it was
already well advanced. "Back in the 1960s the evidence for Einstein's
theory was meagre - just two tests, with 10 per cent precision. But
relativity is now confirmed by several tests, with precision of one
part in 10,000. It's still, in principle, good to have new and
different tests. But the level of confidence in Einstein's theory is
now so high that an announcement of the expected result will 'fork no
lightening'. "Moreover, if there's an unexpected result, I suspect
most people will suspect an error in this very challenging experiment
rather than immediately abandon Einstein: There's now so much evidence
corroborating Einstein, that a high burden of proof is required before
he'll be usurped by any rival theory. "So the most exciting - if un-
alluring - outcome of Gravity Probe B would be a request by Stanford
University for another huge sum of money to repeat it."

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12867-astronomys-future-brightens-with-new-xray-proposal.html
" Constellation-X has been part of NASA's Beyond Einstein programme,
but in September a National Research Council advisory panel said that
programme should be focused on understanding dark energy. That left
the Constellation-X proposal in limbo, and its fate probably will not
be decided until 2010, when an expert review panel is set to recommend
NASA missions for the coming decade. At best, that could mean a launch
for the mission, which is expected to cost $2.1 billion dollars,
around 2020. That leaves NASA with only one modest X-ray mission in
the queue - NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array), which will
study high-energy X-rays."

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