More Obama Money Tied to Union Approval

It is truly the era of union labor. Forty-one states competed for a piece of $4 billion available to reform-minded schools. Of those 41 states, only two were awarded money. And those two states were the only ones claiming unanimous union support. As reported on ABC News:

Experts believed Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana all had strong -- if not stronger -- applications, but what they lacked was the nearly unanimous support from local unions and school districts obtained by Delaware and Tennessee.

"I think this is a win for the unions. What it shows is they have veto power over state application. If they don't sign on, their states are unlikely to get funding," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for National Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

What was that quote by Adam Smith?

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

This is a great time to be in a union or on the government dole--especially while the rest of the economy collapses.

Lunar Orbiter Spies Remnants of Soviet Moon Missions

Isn't this the week for interesting astronomy news.

Nasa recently released images taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter featuring the remains of old Soviet lunar soil sample missions. Pretty cool!

I guess you'd really have to know what you're looking for, and where to find it. Even so, the Soviets really knew their way around a moon mission. Their unmanned robots flew to the moon, then returned to earth with their soil samples. And do so in really cool Lost-in-Space Style!

Well done.

Source.

Mmm...cake.

Are you a fan of ABC's show Lost? Do you like cake? Then here's a very random video you may enjoy: Lost cast members saying, "Mmm...cake."

Unaccounted high-speed cosmic matter migration may point to influence from other universes. Woah.

According to space.com, new studies reveal galaxy clusters that are zipping through our universe at an amazing 1 million mph--without any observable motivation. The really cool part of the story:

The researchers think dark flow may be caused by structures that lie beyond the horizon of our own universe. As odd as that may sound, some cosmologists think that our universe is actually only a bubble of space-time that was created during a period of rapid cosmic expansion, called inflation, after the Big Bang. Other bubbles may also have been created where inflation took place at a different rate, and perhaps something in one of the other bubbles is tugging at our universe.

That's almost mind-blowingly deep. So how do you go about verifying a force that resides outside the known universe? Beats me.