tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76668337796092663602023-11-15T22:03:17.341-08:00Calm Gull, Emergent SeaPeering Into the Abyssonezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.comBlogger645125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-78203922640783991872020-02-10T04:49:00.001-08:002020-02-10T04:49:16.516-08:00Catching Up On A Couple ThingsMy apologies for neglecting this blog. I've been ignoring the news lately, but I do plan to get caught back up on the science articles.<br />
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There have, of course, been some very large developments in politics. As predicted, Trump was acquitted almost perfectly along party lines. The only defection was Mitt Romney. While that is not surprising, I was hoping there would at least be some Democratic senators of conscience, but apparently that is not so. Every single Democratic voted that Trump was guilty of the nebulous non-crimes of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. What's clear is that, whatever charges were presented against the President, the elected Democrats were all ready to convict. The details were irrelevant. It can't be said that the rule of law prevailed here. The rule of law has been torn to shreds! All that can be said is that one faction did not have the numbers to drive the other faction from power. Neo-America will be a third-world country with third-world politics.<br />
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Another news story has been Pete Buttigieg's victory in Iowa. The New York Times has run an article titled <u><i>How Pete Buttigieg Became the Surprise of the Iowa Caucuses</i></u>. They may be surprised, but we aren't. This blog predicted Pete Buttigieg's success many months ago when he was only a minor blip on the radar, based on the Democrats deep desire to snub traditional Christianity. Despite Buttigieg's almost complete inability to capitalize on his unique position, he did manage to squeak out a win versus the Senate's resident socialist kook. What can be gleaned from all this is that all these elite Democrats at the New York Times and on the Buttigieg campaign don't understand themselves at all. That may actually be preferable for us, since they have shown that they have no interest in rule of law, only the exercise of pure power. If they are going to be our enemy, it is better that they err for the reasons that Sun Tsu said one's enemy might err: by understanding neither themselves nor their opponents.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-31777976313324306602020-02-05T06:10:00.001-08:002020-02-05T06:10:27.481-08:00A Tale Of Two CitiesI usually don't watch the Super Bowl. Of course I have no interest in the commercialization, the pop-star halftime shows, or the endless progressive political pandering during the abundant commercial breaks. But also, I don't enjoy the format of nationally broadcasted football. There's the formulaic commentary. There's the panel of four, which includes two noted veterans of the game (invariably white) and two lesser-known younger men in over-the-top fancy suits, at least one of whom must be white. They specialize in filling dead air without saying much. Then, on the field there must be the attractive female reporter. She specializes in getting the insides scoop from the people on the field. The players rarely say anything interesting ("we're going to try real hard to win"), and the coaches occasionally do.<br />
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The theatrics can be ignored if the substance of the game is well done. Unfortunately, the coverage of the game is superficial. Football is a very complex sport. There are 22 players on the field dynamically interacting. The quarterback is constantly reading the defense and adjusting his team, looking for gaps in the defense, responding to pressure they are exerting. The defensive captain shifts his people in response, calls out blitzes, or merely the show of blitzes. Meanwhile, the coaches are involved in a higher level strategic bout against their counterparts. They must call the plays that maximally capitalize on defensive weaknesses, and then note the defensive adjustment and change the calls accordingly. They try to call plays that the defense isn't expecting, while the defense is trying to predict which plays will be called, while not overreacting and exposing weaknesses. A team that is good at running but terrible at passing must still throw the ball from time to time. If there is no threat from the air, the defense could just wall up and shut down the ground game. As passing because a greater danger, the defense must peel off linebackers to help in the secondary.<br />
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These things are rarely mentioned by the commentators. Even worse, they are rarely shown at all! When the quarterback drops into shotgun, the cameras zoom in on him and the linemen. The drama unfolding in the secondary goes off-screen, ignored until the ball moves downstream. We don't know when the secondary shifts from man coverage to the various coverages, or see the strategies the receivers employ to split up defenders and open gaps in the coverage. Watching on TV is not the same as watching live. Having zoomed-in replays is nice, but it is actually harder to watch the event unfolding live on the screen. Football is so complex that it would be impossible for the commentators to describe everything going on. Radio commentators must attempt to do so, which is why the best approach to watching games is to mute the TV and put the radio broadcast over it. The TV crews are simplifying the game by ignoring half of it. The NFL wants to make the game presentable to women, most of whom don't know the difference between a lineman and a linebacker, or between a dive and an option. (Some do, of course, and many men do not.)<br />
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Football is being made into an everybody sport. Guys aren't allowed to have a thing, so football must pander to women. This is evident by what is broadcasted during the commercials. Everything is about "diversity is our strength" signaling, coming together, and all that. The commercials really are a groanfest. The most famous commercial when I was a kid were the infamous Budweiser frogs. They were an amusing antic with no political messaging whatsoever. The Budweiser commercial that I caught this year was a message about rejecting social pressure to be "typical" and its limitations. Nontypical was just another word for diverse.<br />
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Most of the game was a tribute to San Francisco, the queen city of gay pride. By the third quarter, it was pretty clear that Midwest team had little chance of victory. Even the corporate sponsors seemed to revel in the victory of the coastal liberals over corn-fed, red-state America. Then the miraculous happened, and the Chiefs pulled off an unbelievable series of quick trips to the endzone. After the game, the team owner was interviewed in front of the whole stadium, and the entire country. He spoke briefly, but made sure to thank God for the goo fortune of his team. It was quite a departure from the nonstop parade of Globohomo! We joked about it. '<i>Merica! Trump!</i> And then, almost on cue, a Trump campaign ad played. It' hard to believe the network even allowed a Trump ad during the game, but there it was. The whole thing started to feel like something bigger than a football game. It really was a victory of Kansas over California.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-90056166668427031482020-01-30T21:54:00.003-08:002020-01-30T21:54:45.567-08:00The Death Knell Of CivilizationA <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-24/goldman-rule-adds-to-death-knell-of-the-all-white-male-board">recent article</a> in Bloomberg is titled <u>Goldman to Refuse IPOs If All Directors Are White, Straight Men</u>, but the link shows that it was originally titled <u>Goldman Rule Adds To The Death Knell Of The All White Male Board</u>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The era of the white, all-male board is coming to an end.<br /> <br />Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon issued the latest ultimatum Thursday from Davos. Wall Street's biggest underwriter of initial public offerings in the U.S. will no longer take a company public in the U.S. and Europe if it lacks a director who is either female or diverse. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-24/goldman-skips-asia-in-edict-to-boost-diversity-on-boards-in-ipos">Asia is not yet included</a> in the firm’s new policy.</blockquote>
There's so much to unpack from such a small paragraph. So much is being admitted! Most interesting is the use of the term <i>diverse</i> as a substitute for non-white. Diversity just means <i>fewer whites</i>. If a society is 99% nonwhite, the only way to increase diversity would be to eradicate the remaining 1%. Also of note is calling the change of policy an ultimatum. Diversity is no longer our strength; now it is something that you just have to do... or else! Finally we have the extraordinarily awkward mention that Asia is not yet included in the movement to eradicate white, all-male boards. Is that a big thing in Asia? I would have assumed that there were not many such outfits in Asia<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GS:US">Goldman Sachs Group Inc.</a> moves to increase diversity on corporate boards, the investment bank isn’t extending the initiative to a particularly challenged region: Asia.<br /><br />“Nowadays there’s no excuse for companies to have non-diverse, all-male boards,” said Fern Ngai, CEO of Community Business, a Hong Kong-based group that advocates for responsible and inclusive business practices. Goldman “should include Asia. I don’t see why they don’t.”</blockquote>
It's still not clear what the demand is. Obviously fewer men, but do they mean fewer Asians on boards in Asia, or fewer whites? While the anti-white racist sentiment is made abundantly clear for the American and European sectors, it is left vague for Asia. I suspect what is meant for diversity for Hong Kong means more black and Muslims. Diversity means darker. You can bet we'll never hear outlets like Bloomberg advocate for more whites on the boards of non-white countries. That will <i>never</i> happen.<br />
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Perhaps you can see why I never sided with Hong Kong in their dispute with China. Actually, I side with China! They must assert their control over the exclave, because Globohomo has its tentacles all over the place and is squeezing it hard. After The Cult has installed trannies in every school library and castrated every child, they'll naturally move their focus onto places like Hong Kong. The parasite always must move to a new host after the old one has been destroyed.<br />
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Here's another one. It's the exact same story, only in a different context. NOAA is now receiving $4 million in funding to research geo-engineering efforts to block solar radiation, in response to climate hysteria. That same government that wants us to become dependent on solar power also wants to blot the sun from the sky! True absurdity. It's the same story because it's the deliberate effort to destroy civilization. Oh, and here's another one. Yale university will now be discontinuing a popular Renaissance art history course because Renaissance art is too white. The problem with that precedent is that whites have made 95% of all contributions to modern civilization (conservatively) thus <i>civilization must be canceled because it is racist</i>. That is what is happening, before our eyes. We are the people watching our entire civilization be destroyed, and frankly not doing much about it.<br />
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A question rises about the Goldman Sachs decision. Because it is deliberately prejudiced against whites and men, it <i>should </i>be easy pickings for a class-action lawsuit. But it's fairly safe to predict that this policy, this open rejection of the Civil Rights Act (but in a way that makes The Cult happy), will not be overturned by the courts. We aren't going to vote our way out of this crisis, nor will we litigate ourselves out if it.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-24456400692841978102020-01-27T21:37:00.001-08:002020-01-27T22:13:41.382-08:00NASA News #4 A Common ProblemEthan has taken the week off, so we'll only be looking at a handful of article from the NASA site.
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<h3>
First Commercial Moon Delivery Assignments to Advance Artemis (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/first-commercial-moon-delivery-assignments-to-advance-artemis">link</a>)</h3>
In preparation for the planned landing of astronauts on the moon - supposedly a mundane activity given NASA's exemplary track record in that regard - Artemis is sending sixteen scientific payloads to the moon for investigation.
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The NDL is a LIDAR-based (LIght Detection And Ranging) sensor composed of a three-beam optical head and a box with electronics and photonics that will provide extremely precise velocity and range sensing during descent and landing of the lander that will tightly control navigation precision for a soft and controlled touchdown on the Moon.</blockquote>
That hardly seems necessary when a soft and controlled touchdown on the moon can be flawlessly performed (several times) with an unstable single-engine lander, a flight computer with less memory than the modern toothbrush, and some good old-fashioned American stick jokeying.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
SEAL will investigate the chemical response of lunar regolith to the thermal, physical and chemical disturbances generated during a landing, and evaluate contaminants injected into the regolith by the landing itself. It will give scientists insight into the how a spacecraft landing might affect the composition of samples collected nearby.</blockquote>
Why is this necessary? We learned from Apollo that the lander will impart zero thermal or physical disturbances to the powdery surface, and any chemical contamination should easily be checked with the eight hundred pounds of moon rocks returned to the Earth.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
SCALPSS will capture video and still image data of the lander’s plume as the plume starts to impact the lunar surface until after engine shut off, which is critical for future lunar and Mars vehicle designs.</blockquote>
No, it is not critical at all. You just make a standard exhaust nozzle and put the engine right in the crew compartment, which someone can use as a seat. It's not that difficult. Why does NASA act as if the Apollo landings never happened?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
NIRVSS will measure surface and subsurface hydration, carbon dioxide and methane – all resources that could potentially be mined from the Moon -- while also mapping surface temperature and changes at the landing site.</blockquote>
What about the temperature measurements taken by Apollo? Surely they would be informative. Let's follow up with that in an article titled <a href="https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/learning-what-apollo-astronauts-left-moon">Learning from what Apollo astronauts left on the moon</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So Nagihara decided to examine all the temperature data collected through 1977. Sadly, the tapes that recorded these measurements were missing. <b>This is a common problem.</b> During the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists. Many measurements were never properly archived.</blockquote>
So not only were the original communications and navigation tapes all lost, but the scientific data is lost too! Thus, the Artemis mission has been forced to reproduce all that valuable data as if the Apollo landings had never happened at all.<br />
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<h3>
For Hottest Planet, a Major Meltdown, Study Shows (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/for-hottest-planet-a-major-meltdown-study-shows">link</a>)</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Massive gas giants called "hot Jupiters" — planets that orbit too close to their stars to sustain life — are some of the strangest worlds found beyond our solar system. New observations show that the hottest of them all is stranger still, prone to planetwide meltdowns so severe they tear apart the molecules that make up its atmosphere.
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Called KELT-9b, the planet is an ultra-hot Jupiter, one of several varieties of exoplanets — planets around other stars — found in our galaxy. It weighs in at nearly three times the mass of our own Jupiter and orbits a star some 670 light-years away. With a surface temperature of 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,300 degrees Celsius) — hotter than some stars — this planet is the hottest found so far.
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Now, a team of astronomers using NASA's Spitzer space telescope has found evidence that the heat is too much even for molecules to remain intact. Molecules of hydrogen gas are likely ripped apart on the dayside of KELT-9b, unable to re-form until their disjointed atoms flow around to the planet's nightside.</blockquote>
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In this article you'll read claims that hydrogen molecules are "ripped apart" on a faraway exoplanet, and quotes from the graduate student who was the lead author, but no link to the article itself. As is often the case, I had to go searching for it. I don't believe I have ever given commentary on any academic paper without providing a link to it, because I want you to know I'm not lying and to make it easy for you to verify for yourself. Why does NASA not do the same?<br />
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Anyway, here is the article (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01567.pdf">pdf</a>). By my count, there are 22 authors representing 17 institutions and 51 bibliographic references to produce a paper that runs at about 5 pages if images and figures are removed. Does it really take four researchers and ten citations per page for this kind of analysis? Of course not. From our perspective (meaning the non-academic viewpoint) the excessive list of authors and references is amusing, but something we skim over to get to the substance of the article. In their world, consensus means factual, thus those signalers of consensus (author and citation lists) are given more attention than the substance of the article.<br />
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The first paragraph of the introduction reads,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hot Jupiter phase curve observations have led to a wealth of data on energy transport in highly-irradiated planets. This information has spurred the development of theories to describe the resulting trends. The most influential hypothesis has been that the irradiation level is the primary factor controlling energy transport, with hotter planets having shorter radiative timescales and thus less heat redistribution. Lower heat redistribution would lead to increasingly larger phase curve amplitudes and smaller offsets. These trends with irradiation temperature are robust predictions that are born out in models with varying levels of sophistication.</blockquote>
Sophistication is just a synonym for complexity. Now, read the beginning of the next paragraph.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Recent phase curve observations, however, have shown deviation from these trends, which suggests that the radiative timescale may not be the only important factor controlling heat redistribution on hot Jupiters.</blockquote>
To normal people, the second paragraph would seem to refute the first. How are the predictions of the preferred hypothesis robust when multiple observations contradict it? If you can understand this little 2-paragraph dilemma, you understand the big problem with cosmology, which is that the preferred hypotheses remain "robust" no matter the extent of contradicting evidence. Once established, bad ideas are almost impossible to kill, and usually result in more bad ideas needed to keep the equations balanced.<br />
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The gist of the paper is that, upon observing both the day and night sides of the planet, it was determined that the night side is too hot to be accounted for by standard heat convection. Thus, they've hypothesized that hydrogen molecules are disassociated on the hot side and then recombining on the cold side. The effect is akin to the heat of vaporization seen in standard thermodynamics, such as when water is vaporized in a boiler and then transported to radiators, where the condensation of the steam releases much more heat than in systems with only hot water.<br />
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It is worth keeping in mind that these same astronomers don't even understand our own cold Jupiter. They don't understand why the polar regions are so hot (even during their local winters) or why the planet emits much more radiation that it receives from the sun. Despite the what the title of the paper says, no evidence actually exists of this hypothesized heat of molecular dissociation. <b>The existence of the problem is not evidence of the hypothesis.</b> In this case, there is no evidence at all about the broken hydrogen molecules. But it was the best idea they could come up so that's all the evidence that is needed! (Can you imagine if our normal-people jobs were held to such low standards?) The whole paper amounts to an exercise in creative writing. It is a few pages of pretty graphs floating on a canvas of creative prose, bookended by a block of co-authors on one end and a block of citations on the other. The goal is to make the bookends so formidable that no one will dare question the contents the sits between them.<br />
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<h3>
NASA's Kepler Witnesses Vampire Star System Undergoing Super-Outburst (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasas-kepler-witnesses-vampire-star-system-undergoing-super-outburst">link</a>)</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A new search of Kepler archival data has uncovered an unusual super-outburst from a previously unknown dwarf nova. The system brightened by a factor of 1,600 over less than a day before slowly fading away.<br />
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The star system in question consists of a white dwarf star with a brown dwarf companion about one-tenth as massive as the white dwarf. A white dwarf is the leftover core of an aging Sun-like star and contains about a Sun's worth of material in a globe the size of Earth. A brown dwarf is an object with a mass between 10 and 80 Jupiters that is too small to undergo nuclear fusion.<br />
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The brown dwarf circles the white dwarf star every 83 minutes at a distance of only 250,000 miles (400,000 km) – about the distance from Earth to the Moon. They are so close that the white dwarf's strong gravity strips material from the brown dwarf, sucking its essence away like a vampire. The stripped material forms a disk as it spirals toward the white dwarf (known as an accretion disk).
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I can't find the paper for this one, but we know the convention. Most of those confident numbers are not actually observed but are inferences taken from a model of the mechanism they believe to have caused the unexpected super-outburst. You can probably guess what that mechanism is, too. (Hint, it's the same one they use to explain nearly every unexplained phenomena in the cosmos.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Theories suggest that a super-outburst is triggered when the accretion disk reaches a tipping point. As it accumulates material, it grows in size until the outer edge experiences gravitational resonance with the orbiting brown dwarf. This might trigger a thermal instability, causing the disk to get superheated.</blockquote>
Yep, good old-fashioned accretion disks show themselves again. How do they explain the observed outburst? You see, a tipping point is reached when a gravitational resonance triggers a thermal instability. (In other words, they have no idea.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"These dwarf nova systems have been studied for decades, so spotting something new is pretty tricky," said Ridden-Harper. "We see accretion disks all over – from newly forming stars to supermassive black holes – so it's important to understand them."</blockquote>
Correction: they see accretion disks <i>nowhere</i>. They <i>hypothesize</i> about accretion disks all over. Very big difference. But in their world, a hypothesis is as good as an observation, so long as there are enough co-authors listed. Seeing is believing but, to them, believing is seeing.<br />
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<h3>
How Earth Climate Models Help Scientists Picture Life on Unimaginable Worlds (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/how-earth-climate-models-help-scientists-picture-life-on-unimaginable-worlds">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
Yes, this is a real headline from the NASA site, but is anyone surprised anymore? The same climate models that tell us Manhattan is currently underwater are sure to tell us a lot about planets so far away that they cannot be seen directly - only inferred by their effect on a host star.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In scanning the cosmos with large ground-based and space telescopes, astronomers have discovered an eclectic assortment of worlds that seem drawn from the imagination.</blockquote>
It's their symbolism, not mine, but I won't contest it. It's interesting how often their metaphors are inadvertently revealing. It's like a deep truth try to claw out however it can.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Models such as ROCKE-3D begin with only grains of basic information about an exoplanet: its size, mass, and distance from its star. Scientists can infer these things by watching the light from a star dip as a planet crosses in front of it, or by measuring the gravitational tugging on a star as a planet circles it.
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These scant physical details inform equations that comprise up to a million lines of computer code needed to build the most sophisticated climate models. The code instructs a computer like NASA's Discover supercomputer to use established rules of nature to simulate global climate systems. </blockquote>
That is a good description of the problem. A few scant data points are fed into models with up to a million lines of code. The result is... pretty much whatever you want it to be. If you're "established rules of nature" are really just establishment rules of nature, then your results align with the consensus and they give you money.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Discovering life on distant planets is a gamble, Del Genio noted: “So if we want to observe most wisely, we have to take recommendations from climate models, because that’s just increasing the odds.”</blockquote>
This is utter nonsense. They're just trying to find a way to latch on the climate change funding narrative. The only odds that are increased here are the the odds that more grant money will be incoming. Even if it somehow made sense that earthly climate models would help with the exoplanet searches, our climate models are wrong so they would only hinder progress. It's like saying that to find Earthlike planets, we need to factor in the polling models that showed Hillary Clinton taking an easy win. Not only does it make no sense, but it would still be wrong even it if did.<br />
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<h3>
New Mission Will Take 1st Peek at Sun’s Poles (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/new-mission-will-take-first-peek-at-sun-s-poles">link</a>)</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Solar Orbiter, a collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA, will have its first opportunity to launch from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7, 2020, at 11:15 p.m. EST. Launching on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, the spacecraft will use Venus’s and Earth’s gravity to swing itself out of the ecliptic plane — the swath of space, roughly aligned with the Sun’s equator, where all planets orbit. From there, Solar Orbiter's bird’s eye view will give it the first-ever look at the Sun's poles.</blockquote>
An interesting probe that's about to launch. I don't have any predictions to offer, but expect that any novel observations made will only contrast the standard solar model (as has already occurred with the Parker probe).onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-32196166159854005852020-01-26T19:14:00.000-08:002020-01-26T20:43:53.200-08:00The Senate Should ImpeachWe've not been covering the impeachment proceedings here. One reason is that the event is completely mainstream. There's no shortage of commentary and analysis, so there's little left to say. Another reason is that I just can't compel myself to care about it. It's not very interesting. My limited exposure has been seeing the news headlines on the TVs at the gym (also over live footage of Schiff talking), and then this <a href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/U0ipS5gjmDc/">Viva Frei video</a> discussing Schiff's closing arguments. I couldn't even make it 3 minutes into that video because I can't stand to hear Peter Schiff talk. Of course he's lying and the whole thing is a blatant sham, so who cares what he's saying? I notice that hardly anyone in the bloglist (on the sidebar) is talking about the impeachment either. All those writers are, if not outright pro-Trump partisans, at least savvy enough to understand political theater when they see it. You'd think such people would be quite livid at seeing the coup attempt now move into the Senate, but largely they are ignoring it for the same reason I am: it's just not that interesting.<br />
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It doesn't even seem like the goal of the hearings is to impeach. The goal of the hearings is to have the hearings. Schiff is up there getting his earthly reward. He gets to stand on the pulpit preaching as if he is the courageous defender of virtue, and everyone has to watch and pretend that it is so. He undoubtedly fancies himself as a Cicero, a great orator standing against the rising tyranny. It's an inversion of reality, of course, but to him it's as good as real. The Democrats have pursued the strategy largely for lack of anything better to do. The moment there was a reprieve in witch hunting, "the squad" started calling Pelosi a racist. Suddenly, impeachment proceedings sounded kinda nice. They know Trump won't be removed from office, and that the stunt is likely to backfire, but they hope that they can keep Trump on his heels with fake investigations until he is voted out in the fall.<br />
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Even if they succeed, then what? Trump is out and Pence is in. Not much will change. The oval office will still be occupied by someone considered an absolute heretic by The Cult. The only difference is that the Washington establishment will have demonstrated that unauthorized elections can be overturned. Who does that benefit? Not them. The illusion of democracy is the source of their legitimacy. No, it would benefit right-wing dissidents. If there is one principle that divides us from the rest of conservaties, it is that <i>we will not win back our nation through elections</i>. Democracy took our country, and will not give it back willingly. The sooner our fellow Americans realize this, the sooner we can at least stop the bleeding. Nothing would be more in our favor that having a president ousted for the crimes of his opponent.<br />
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In this case, the show of power can only backfire. It does not punish the voters whom they'd like to punish. It may punish Trump, but that won't deter ambitious men from seeking the office. If they fail, then Trump becomes stronger because the threat of impeachment will have already been exhausted. If thy succeed, then they make <i>our case for us</i>, which is that the democracy is a sham and we are vassals of the Empire of Columbia. It would destroy civic nationalism for us.<br />
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Because the outcome isn't that important, it's just not that interesting. Watching the Senate turn into a circus during the Kavanaugh hearings <i>was</i> interesting. It was an outrage! But that seal has been broken. After all that hysteria, watching the Senate now engage in a fake trial is hardly noteworthy. No one cares, and no one is watching. Whether the Democrats stab themselves in the eye or shoot themselves in the foot, and whatever lies they spew between now and the time they get there, is just not something anyone wants to waste their time on.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-52837409253913799002020-01-22T22:22:00.000-08:002020-01-22T22:22:04.167-08:00Real Climate Science<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Tony Heller shows how government institutions like NASA misrepresent climate data.</div>
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It's very hard for reasonably intelligent people, when provided with this data, not to come to the conclusion that there is a clear trend of warming, and that anyone who refutes the trend is a "science denier" because the data is right there as clear as day. Their worldview suffers two major flaws.<br />
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First, they can't imagine that NASA would be dishonest, and assume that anyone confidently declaring "fake data!!!" is far more likely to be the dishonest party. However, NASA may actually be the most dishonest organization within the entire government (which is saying a lot these days). Because of NASA, people the world over look up at the night sky and marvel that man walked around on its surface half a century ago. It is the greatest lie ever fabricated. Compared to that, skewing some temperature data is pedestrian.<br />
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Second, people don't understand the difference between raw data and model outputs. To a certain extent that is understandable because NASA (whom they trust) is doing everything it can to sew confusion on that matter. In the most recent NASA News column on this blog, we dove into a few papers being promoted by the NASA homepage. They were peer-reviewed by major journals, and yet routinely passed off model outputs as measurements. Most of the people who follow the NASA newsfeed, and even many who dig into the journals as well, are left with the impression that NASA has measured the size of a neutron star... and that's that. It's a cold fact that cannot be argued against. But it isn't actually a fact. It's an opinion! It is not a fundamental measurement, but the result of a process which takes completely different set of data and tries to infer what certain measurements would be, <i>based on the modeler's understanding of the domain</i>. If it is the modeler's opinion that pulsars are caused by neutron stars, then the model is going to return some opinionated measurements of those stars.<br />
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This is the same phenomenon that caused the great polling fiasco of 2016. For many months, we said the polls were wrong. (I actually made a good chunk of change because of it.) The liberals told us not only that we were wrong, but that it was absurd to call polls wrong, which are just a collection of data and thus - facts. Well, <i>they</i> were wrong because the polling data that gets released to the public are model outputs. Because it's impossible to get a perfectly accurate poll of American voters without questioning every single one, they scale the data to try to make it representative of the larger group. For instance, if they find that 60% of those who respond are women, they'll attempt to adjust the results to account for that. It's the adjusted data that gets promoted, not the raw numbers. That works fine as long as the pollster is competent, knowledgeable, and not biased to prefer a particular outcome.<br />
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The same flawed logic causes huge problems in such disparate fields as astrophysics, climate studies, and political punditry. But ask yourself, of these groups of people, which do you expect to understand the implications of viewing adjusted data rather than raw data?<br />
<ul>
<li>Facebook users</li>
<li>political activists</li>
<li>naive college graduates</li>
<li>news anchors reading a teleprompter</li>
<li>high school science teachers</li>
<li>pundits on corporate talk shows</li>
<li>politicians</li>
<li>esteemed scientists representing renown research institutions who are published in premier Journals</li>
</ul>
It is, of course, the scientists whom we should most expect to know better. That has been why this blog has slowly shifted focus from politics, towards the narratives promoted by the press, and now more towards the scientists and their institutions. Because, if even the scientists aren't even held to the standard of understanding the difference between raw data versus the inferences made from that data, then there's no way we can expect the people of those other groups to do so as well.<br />
<br />
While I have been following Tony Heller for a while on YouTube, I only just realized he keeps a blog with an RSS feed. It is very active, and has been added to the bloglist on the sidebar. I recommend following and sharing his videos, as they are very accessible to the general public.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-2446365494983712952020-01-19T22:41:00.000-08:002020-01-20T20:45:37.698-08:00Contrabang! #35 Surprising Not Surprising<h3>
Astronomers Find A Galaxy Of Unusual Size (G.O.U.S.), And Discover Why It Exists (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/astronomers-find-a-galaxy-of-unusual-size-g-o-u-s-and-discover-why-it-exists-77ff5b6662a2">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Above a certain size, spiral galaxies shouldn’t exist. A single major merger — where two galaxies of comparable mass interact to form a larger one — will almost always destroy that spiral structure, producing a giant elliptical instead. The only ultra-large spiral galaxies we typically find are in the process of gravitationally interacting with a neighbor, producing an extended but temporary “grand spiral” structure.
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But for every rule, there are remarkable exceptions.</blockquote>
There it is. To cosmologists, rules are not really rules. They are way beyond the point of demanding that their theories explain observations, and can happily discard contradictions as "remarkable exceptions."<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The fact that a galaxy this large and massive is so regularly shaped, with such low levels of star formation and so few globular clusters (1600) for its incredible size really does make this a cosmic unicorn.</blockquote>
A cosmic unicorn...what an apt metaphor for a science that has devolved into little more than mysticism and fairy tales.<br />
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<h3>
Did LIGO Just Discover Two Fundamentally Different Types Of Neutron Star Mergers? (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/did-ligo-just-discover-two-fundamentally-different-types-of-neutron-star-mergers-402fbbb36320">link</a>)</h3>
No, they didn't, because neutron stars don't exist.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
LIGO just announced the second neutron star-neutron star merger ever seen in gravitational waves. It doesn’t match the first.</blockquote>
That they don't match is of little surprise.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Still, the April 25, 2019 signal that showed up in the LIGO Livingston detector — the one that was online at the time — was extremely strong, achieving a detection signal-to-noise significance of 12.9, where 5 is the “gold standard” for a robust detection. The form of the signal was incredibly analogous to what was seen back on August 17, 2019 in both LIGO detectors, but had an inherently greater amplitude, indicating a higher set of masses for both neutron stars, as well as a higher combined mass.</blockquote>
The signal-to-noise numbers are not true measurements, but guesses based on their noise cancelation methods. There are no strong signals seen in the raw data.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The lack of [an accompanying gamma ray] signal appears, on its surface, to suggest something absolutely remarkable. Perhaps lower-mass neutron star mergers produce gamma rays, ejecta, the Universe’s heaviest elements, and a multi-wavelength, long-lasting afterglow. And perhaps, above a certain mass threshold, higher-mass neutron star mergers simply interact and go directly to a black hole, swallowing up all of the matter associated with both stars, producing no heavy elements and emitting no further observable signal at all.
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<br />
This is an eminent possibility from a theoretical perspective. If two neutron stars merge together and don’t immediately create an event horizon, an enormous, runaway fusion reaction will begin to occur.</blockquote>
I'm not spun up on the intricacies of neutron star merger theory (because it doesn't matter) but it's not clear what sort of fusion could occur. Fusion, as normally understood, is the merger of two separate atomic nuclei into one larger nucleus. How does that apply to the hypothetical neutronium...have they invented new hypothetical physics for that state of matter too?<br />
<br />
What falls out of this article is speculation that the reason the more recent neutron star merger detection wasn't accompanied by a gamma ray burst observation is that an event horizon formed too quickly for any signal to escape. So they already have an excuse handy for when the highly touted multisignal messenger search fails to pan out.<br />
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<h3>
The Milky Way Is Gaining New Stars From A Collision That Hasn’t Even Occurred Yet (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-milky-way-is-gaining-new-stars-from-a-collision-that-hasnt-even-occurred-yet-cebdea15e2a3">link</a>)</h3>
In the second paragraph, Ethan shares the surprise of the recent discovery of a dense collection of stars discovered in the far fringes of the Milky Way galaxy in the direction of the Magellanic Clouds (emphasis added)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thanks to the all-sky coverage of ESA’s Gaia satellite — designed to measure properties of stars such as parallax, motion through the sky, stellar colors, etc. — humanity has gained the ability to measure more than a billion stars within about 100,000 light-years of home: almost the entire extent of the Milky Way galaxy. When scientists used this data set to search for new, blue stars, they got <b>quite a surprise</b>: 94,000 light-years away, deep in the galactic halo’s outskirts, a giant collection of young stars was found. It’s the first of its kind, and scientists think they understand why.</blockquote>
A few lines later, he re-emphasizes the rarity of the finding.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Remarkably, all of these factors line up, and this new star cluster really is a finding like nothing ever before.</blockquote>
And yet, just a few lines further, the surprise has already worn off.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It’s <b>no surprise</b> that the gravitational interactions between the Milky Way and each of the Magellanic Clouds would lead to the formation of new stars; the tidal forces between gas-filled objects often triggers new star-formation events.</blockquote>
It's common in the cosmology world to see new observations called surprising, only to soon be explained away as somehow predicted by the standard models. It is less common to see that process unfold in the span of only a few paragraphs!<br />
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From the standard gravity-dominated view of the cosmos, the recent observations amount to a "remarkable conclusion that changes the way we think our local galactic neighborhood" because "new gas is already being funneled into the Milky way from satellite galaxies that are still nearly 200,000 light-years away."<br />
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From an EU-perspective, it is understood that the Milky Way is related and coupled to the other objects within the local group, and the discovery of plasma flowing between the Milky Way and the Magellanic clouds is little different than the recent (surprising) discoveries of massive current sheaths connecting galaxies over enormous distances.<br />
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<h3>
Ask Ethan: Does A Time-Stopping Paradox Prevent Black Holes From Growing? (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-does-a-time-stopping-paradox-prevent-black-holes-from-growing-2f459136fe93">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
A reader asks</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[F]or any object falling into a black hole, time slows down upon approach and comes to a standstill as the object reaches the event horizon. Reaching and passing that border would take an infinite amount of time measured by a distant observer… if ‘eating’ matter would take infinite time… how could supermassive black holes come into existence?</blockquote>
Yet another black hole paradox, this one asks how we can observe the growth of black holes when infalling matter will appear forever in suspended animation. From our perspective, once a black hole is formed there is no reason for us to ever observe it grow any larger, thus we could have no evidence of the supermassive black holes alleged to exist at galactic centers.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It sounds like a paradox, but relativity explains how it all really happens.</blockquote>
Ethan's track record of clarifying black hole paradoxes is not stellar. Regular readers may recall that some time ago he offered up the existence of ring singularities to explain the paradox of infinite densities in black holes...but that was the wrong paradox! The ring singularity is a construction meant to explain the infinite angular velocity paradox of black holes. It's hard to keep them all straight! Perhaps he will redeem himself with this newer attempt.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Imagine that we begin with a black hole of one solar mass, that doesn’t rotate, with an event horizon of the exact size that our Sun would be if it collapsed into a Schwarzschild black hole: a sphere of about 3 kilometers in radius. Now, let’s take another one solar mass object — perhaps another star just like our Sun — and let’s allow it to fall in to this black hole.</blockquote>
Never mind...another epic fail. Why does Ethan specify a Schwarzschild black hole, rather than using the term black hole in a more general sense? To convey that he is smart and knows what he's talking about, most likely. (Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.) The Schwarzschild solution is valid for a universe with only a single, massive body. This can be confirmed easily enough merely by browsing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem_in_general_relativity">Wikipedia</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This solution pertains when the mass M of one body is overwhelmingly greater than the mass m of the other.</blockquote>
Thus, his hypothetical setup is inherently invalid. There cannot be both a Schwarzschild black hole of one solar mass and another object of one stellar mass. His answer is that once the new mass is at the event horizon, then that is good enough because the event horizon will expand with the addition of the new mass to the system. Perhaps he should re-work the example for a single particle falling in.</div>
onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-52007308622884870222020-01-18T18:33:00.001-08:002020-01-19T08:58:04.132-08:00New Book Says Trump Really Mean To Generals<div class="tr_bq">
A forthcoming book by a Washington Post reporter is fully dedicated - unsurprisingly - to attacking the current President. <a href="https://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/01/its-not-as-if-hes-wrong.html">Vox Day</a> provides of snippet of some DailyBeast coverage of the new book.</div>
<blockquote>
The president reportedly called Afghanistan a “loser war,” and told his military leaders: “You’re all losers... You don’t know how to win anymore... I want to win... We don’t win any wars anymore... We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.” It’s reported that Trump was so angry at this point that he wasn’t breathing properly.
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In his most incendiary comment, Trump—a man who, remember, managed to get out of military duty in Vietnam due to a supposed bone-spur problem—is said to have told the assembled forces, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people... You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
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The comment reportedly left the room dumbfounded. Tillerson was “visibly seething,” and decided to speak up. The secretary of state said, “No, that’s just wrong... Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.” When the meeting ended soon afterward, Tillerson reportedly stood with a small group of confidants and said, “He’s a fucking moron.”
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One senior official summed up the meeting: “We needed to change how he thinks about this, to course correct... They were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views.”
</blockquote>
It's always amusing when they try to appeal to red-state America with their TDS. Flyover country loves muh military more than anything, right? Supposedly, Trump's brusque handling of the generals should dampen his support among his red-blooded base. What they don't realize is that most Americans' hatred for the Washington Post is stronger than their loyalty to Washington's armies. This book won't move the needle at all and, if it did, it will only serve to lower the military's approval rating.<br />
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How is he wrong? The liberals, who only a decade or so ago were holding anti-war rallies across the globe, are now attempting to humiliate the president for not understanding the virtues of perpetual warfare. The portion that Vox quoted is not even the most condescending aspect of the article.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The book states that the meeting took place six months into Trump’s presidency after his generals became concerned about “gaping holes” in Trump’s knowledge of America’s key alliances. The idea was to bring Trump to the Pentagon’s Situation Room, where military leaders, so the plan went, would give him a crash course on who America’s allies were, why they were worth keeping on side, and where on earth they were located.
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The account states Trump repeatedly interrupted the lesson after apparently being triggered by a word or phrase uttered by the military leaders. One example given is that he heard the word “base” during the lesson, which sparked him into launching a tirade about how “crazy” and “stupid” it was that the U.S. paid to build and maintain bases overseas.</blockquote>
Because of the rabid anti-Trump coloring of the Washington Post and the DailyBeast, it's impossible to tell what the actual attitude of the generals was but, if they were even a fraction as condescending as his described here, then it's no wonder he grew angry with the proceedings. One can imagine about how the meeting went. "And if you look at this spot on the pretty map, Mr President, this is where the Kurds live. The Kurds are a key asset to US interests because blah blah blah."<br />
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It's hard for the Washington Post elites to understand that most Trump supporters have served in the military or have close friends & family who have. The rank-and-file somewhat despise the general staff. It's well understood that there is some strange magic in getting promoted to general, which somehow involves passing over all the highly competent and charismatic Colonels & Lt Colonels and picking slimy, weaselly careerists. Vox calls them "mediocre perfumed princes," which errs on the side of being polite. These people really are self-appointed royalty who are largely disconnected from their troops and their missions.<br />
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The worst story I heard had to do with human remains (HR) flights, which I heard from someone who was directly involved. Every so often, the Air Force was tasked with sending a cargo plane to gather the bodies of deceased servicemen to return them to the US for burial. A general had planned to travel within theater for a golf trip, but his personal jet went down for maintenance. There were no other similar planes available, so he ordered that a cargo jet tasked with HR duty be re-assigned for his use. This caused quite a stir in the office responsible for processing those requests. Ultimately, the shop lead - a master sergeant - dismissed the request. It's unheard of for an enlisted man to contradict a general, but in this case the general's request was too much for any of the people tasked with carrying it out to stomach. They were shocked that a general would so callously display that dead soldiers and airmen were less important than his golf outing.<br />
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Those are the same generals that the Washington Post just can't believe the president would treat harshly. They're the same strategists who have implemented the current strategy of subverting whichever faction seems to be the strongest. That's why they can't ever leave, because the region was de-stabilized when Hussein was ousted and order has only been maintained by constant outside intervention. There are now Americans old enough to vote who were born after the Afghanistan war started. What we don't need is another anti-Trump harangue but a book titled something like <i>How To Win A War In Under Two Decades</i> and provide a copy to every general in the country.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-62576355159401668392020-01-16T21:17:00.000-08:002020-01-16T21:34:09.329-08:00The Inverse Of ViceIt is often assumed that virtue is the opposite of vice, in the way that good is the opposite of bad. That comparison does not hold, because good/bad is an abstract polarity that may not actually exist in nature. A character attribute becomes a virtue when it exists in the correct proportions rather than in some extreme. The opposite of ice-cold bath water is not tepid, but scalding-hot. The balance is somewhere in the middle, and depends on context. If a bully is hurling insults, it may be virtuous to ignore him; if he is hurling stones, then no good will come of ignoring it.<br />
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This turns out to be a significant problem in general. People - who mostly prefer virtue to vice - are nevertheless led to one vice in the course of rejecting another. This turns out to be an acute problem in liberal democracy. It takes a certain threshold of sophistication to understand that virtues are proportional rather than extremal, that history is cyclical rather than linear, and that cause/effect dynamics are probabilistic rather than deterministic. The voting public is not up to that level of sophistication, as can be evidenced by the political messaging.<br />
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The moral dilemma is that the quest for virtue is apt to lead to vice. They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I always thought that meant that people are lazy, in the way that the gyms are always busy for a few weeks after New Year's resolutions are declared, and then thin out. But that's not right. Hell is the domain of real vice, not half-assed virtues. Few people are motivated by calls to be evil, but may with great enthusiasm take on anti-vice crusades which have the effect of injecting great energy into the cause of the opposing vice. Good intentions, misapplied, are far more dangerous than neutrality or even evil intentions.<br />
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How does evil take hold in people, who are generally good? By inversion. We know that the left is inverted. They reject the West as evil, and so seek its opposite. Of course they are misguided, as Western civilization has given more good to the world than probably all other civilizations combined. But the West is a collection of people, and thus flawed. Many of our opponents these days are working in reaction to the horrors of the two World Wars. Obviously there was no virtue in sending Europe's young men off to a pointless meat-grinder. So they have sought the opposite of that vice, which has lead to the fervent adoption of anti-nationalism and the rejection of traditional European identities of any sort. It's the reason that Hitler has replaced Satan, and Nazis the forces of evil. It's why they avow that Europeans have no culture, because to acknowledge that would lead invariably to the suggestion that those cultures are worth fighting for.<br />
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Perhaps it could be argued that the West became too Puritanical. The reaction has been militant atheism. This blog practically obsesses over what a disaster materialism has been for us. The West without a doubt was - and still is - overly imperial. The reaction to that has been to open up our own borders to the world. Invade the world, invite the world. Vice, vice. The inverse of vice is more vice, and those two opposing vices do not cancel each other out. Perhaps you think the old West was too disenfranchising to women. Maybe it was. The opposite has been the emerging matriarchy of today. Sweden boasts that they are the world's first feminist government. They are now under existential threat due to the immigration of foreigners and their own anemic birth rates. It's not nice or fair to tell women they can't vote, or probably even ideal, as they possess a great deal of social acuity, attention to detail, and risk aversion that men often lack. And yet, Sweden was never destroyed by chauvinism or militarism or empire, but a few decades of feminism may ruin the nation entirely.<br />
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A similar dynamic is seen with the historical oppression of homosexuality. Whatever your thoughts on that, it should be clear that the answer should not be the sexualization and castration of schoolchildren. That's the problem with the inverse of vice, is there is no proportionality. Slight & perceived vices are countered by extreme & actual vices. Extremism is always reactionary. This is why we must have a positive identity. We must have a firm understanding of the virtues we strive for, rather than the vices we oppose. If the virtue is not clear, then the reaction will lead surely from one vice to another. Ever since the West abandoned Christ - the ideal embodiment of virtue - we have reeled from one vice to the next. The young men of Europe were crushed between the gears of opposing ideologies that rose to fill the vacuum left by God - just as Nietzsche predicted. We'll never get to a good place by walking backwards. We must face fully towards the light to have any hope of getting to a better place.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-12852639052067003662020-01-13T21:00:00.002-08:002020-01-13T21:05:44.930-08:00Farmers Rejecting Modern MachineryAfter serving a few years overseas in the military, the cars being driven in America seemed quite conspicuous. Our vehicles are big, shiny, and expensive. Even in other rich countries, such as Japan and Western Europe, the cars are simpler, smaller, and boxier. It was quite clear that, compared to other countries, we spend a lot of money on vehicles, for little gain in practicality (and probably a loss). I returned around the time of the Great Recession. For two years I had heard endlessly about the tough times, people out of work, kicked out of their homes, etc. I was then surprised to see the highways not just full of $50,000 trucks and SUVs, but numerous toys as well: RVs, sport cars, powerboats, motorcycles, and the like. There were even trikes!<br />
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I see something similar these days whenever I drive through the countryside. The farm equipment is very expensive. Farmers like to leave their tracked Cat tractors and half million dollar John Deere combines out for people to see. Such vehicles are many times more expensive than the shiny passenger vehicles driving by, and could be traded for two or maybe three decent homes in the area. I always wonder if such monstrous modern machines are worth the investment. I assume the farmers have done their numbers, although there is reason to wonder if they actually haven't and the pricey machines are not economical.<br />
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The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that many farmers now believe they are poor investments, and are instead buying up <a href="http://www.startribune.com/for-tech-weary-midwest-farmers-40-year-old-tractors-now-a-hot-commodity/566737082/?refresh=true">40-year-old machinery</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.</blockquote>
This past summer I put out an article called <a href="https://calmgullemergentsea.blogspot.com/2019/07/maintenance-free-means-unmaintainable.html">Maintenance Free Means Unmaintainable</a>. This was in the context of windows, as I was looking to replace my 50-year-old wooden windows with modern, more efficient windows. The tipoff came in the form of door-to-door window salesmen, who were aggressive - which meant there were juicy profit margins to be had. It didn't take a lot of number crunching to realize that the plastic replacement windows - with their 20-year lifespans - would never recoup their costs in energy savings before being tossed into a landfill. Not only are the old wooden windows more economical, they are more environmentally conscious. (The major upside to modern windows is that they are easier to clean. That may be a perk to lazy people, but not to me. Because I'm <i>very</i> lazy and rarely clean windows anyway.)<br />
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My old storm windows - particularly those on the southern exposure, were in very rough shape. Exposed wood, cracked glass, and sections where the glazing had decayed to nothing at all... plus some shoddy maintenance by the previous owners. After watching a handful of YouTube videos and a trip (or five) to the hardware store, I was able to strip the windows, replace broken glass, sand, glaze, and re-paint all of them by hand - for the total cost of probably a couple hundred bucks and lots of hours in the garage. I'm now trained in home window maintenance and can handle most common problems that will arise. On the other hand, what would I have done if one of the new fancy windows cracked and leaked out all the argon gas? I could do nothing. Perhaps hire a window technician to take a look at it but, even then, it may turn out that the whole sash must be thrown into a landfill and replaced with a new one. A similar trend occurs in modern farming.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.</blockquote>
The trend across the board is towards products that are either completely unmaintainable, or at least unmaintainable to the owner. It's not just the money spent on technicians, but the loss of control over the operation. The farmer finds himself at the mercy of the technician. <i>Hopefully he gets out here soon. Hopefully he's not an idiot.</i> The only justification for the massive machinery is that planting & harvesting windows can be short. The longer it takes, the more the risk of a change in the weather. Not only is his equipment liable to break down right when he needs it most, by everyone else's will too... and they'll all need a technician. A few days' delay could risk the kind of disaster that the pricey machines were supposed to prevent anyway.<br />
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If I have a modern-window problem in the house, I must hope that there is a competent repairman in the area who charges a fair rate and isn't booked out for half the summer. Then I must still dedicate time to the task by being available to supervise the operation - probably taking off work to do so, at a time that may not be ideal. On the other hand, I can repair wooden storm windows at my leisure, on nights & weekends when the garage temperature is bearable. Having control of the operation is an even bigger benefit than the money saved on parts & labor.<br />
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There is also a pride of ownership aspect that doesn't come with hiring out the work. It is far more gratifying to have labored to provide a home for the family, rather than only writing a check. I get more satisfaction now gazing at the house I've spent so many hours on, even than if a professional had come and done more quality work (which is often not the case, in my experience). The farmers feel a similar motivation in their operations.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things,” Peterson said.</blockquote>
The major perks of farming are the independence and self-reliance that comes with the job. Not one farmer out there wants to have to tell his wife that harvesting is on hold until the kid from the dealership can come bail him out with a firmware upgrade. He wants to say he's going to go do some impromptu welding, or rewire a switch, or anything but wait for a kid with an iPad.<br />
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We should take a note from the farmers in Minnesota. There is a hefty, invisible cost of unmaintainable products, and most new products these days are less maintainable than the old ones.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-82326009614399836432020-01-12T20:03:00.002-08:002020-01-13T05:35:17.470-08:00NASA News #3 Cosmic Makeovers and Speed LimitsEthan's blog was boring this week, but there's an abundance of NASA material following the holiday season lull. I've picked three and given more substantial (and technical) treatments than normal.<br />
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<h3>
NASA's Great Observatories Help Astronomers Build a 3D Visualization of an Exploded Star (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasas-great-observatories-help-astronomers-build-a-3d-visualization-of-an-exploded-star">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
The headline is not a lie, as the multi-spectrum image of the nebula is phenomenal.<br />
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<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/stsci-h-p2003a-d-1280x720.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/stsci-h-p2003a-d-1280x720.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Of special interest are the core x-ray emissions, shown here in isolation.<br />
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<a href="https://scitechdaily.com/images/X-ray-View-of-Crab-Nebula-777x741.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="741" data-original-width="777" height="381" src="https://scitechdaily.com/images/X-ray-View-of-Crab-Nebula-777x741.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In the electric universe (EU) world, this is a canonical plasma torus. In the mainstream viewpoint, it is unexpected and must be explained. In their view, the central star is the source of power for the whole structure and, since the system pulsates at 30 beats per second, the star is assumed to be a pulsar - a rapidly spinning neutron star.<br />
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It's worth keeping in mind that every aspect of neutron stars is either theoretical or unknown. The only reason they exist is because scientists could offer no other explanation for rapid oscillations of powerful light sources other than some rapidly spinning star. Everything from that point on is conjecture. They reckon that any object which rotated many times per second must be very compact and dense, thus they proposed it was made of neutronium - a substance of pure neutrons which were chosen to avoid the problems with rapidly spinning and mutually repulsive charged particles like protons. There are problems with neutrons too. For instance, they are known to be quite unstable outside of a balanced atomic nucleus. It is assumed that they act differently when compressed under intense gravity.<br />
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The other problem with neutron stars - besides the flights of theoretical fantasy and the suspension of reasonable skepticism - is that all aspects of them are refuted by observations. For one, neutron stars exhibit copious amounts of synchrotron radiation, which is emitted by high-velocity particles when they are accelerated by a magnetic field. Thus, cosmologists state that pulsars have the strongest known magnetic fields in the universe, which are caused by the spinning neutron star - but they have no idea how. Also, pulsars are observed to "glitch" and shift pulsating frequencies. The Crab Nebula's most significant glitch was a noticeable increase in frequency that persisted for two days, before returning to the normal rate.<br />
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The theory that the central star powers the whole nebula is refuted by evidence. For instance, several years ago a study on <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/10/crab-nebulas-neutron-star-is-pulsing-with-gamma-rays/">Crab Nebula gamma rays</a> showed that they were emitted some distance away from the central star. This observation is actually congruent with the X-ray image shown above, since most of the x-rays come from the plasma torus and jets.<br />
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With all that background, the NASA statements can be read with some level of amusement.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This neutron star is the super-dense collapsed core of an exploded star and is now a pulsar that rotates at a blistering rate of 30 times per second. A disk of X-ray-emitting material, spewing jets of high-energy particles perpendicular to the disk, surrounds the pulsar. The infrared light in this image shows synchrotron radiation, formed from streams of charged particles spiraling around the pulsar's strong magnetic fields. The visible light is emission from oxygen that has been heated by higher-energy (ultraviolet and X-ray) synchrotron radiation. The delicate tendrils seen in visible light form what astronomers call a "cage" around the rich tapestry of synchrotron radiation, which in turn encompasses the energetic fury of the X-ray disk and jets. These multiwavelength interconnected structures illustrate that the pulsar is the main energy source for the emission seen by all three telescopes.</blockquote>
Somehow, the existence of "tendrils" - their term for plasma filaments - are proof that the nebula is powered by a central neutron star.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
These nested structures are particular to the Crab Nebula. They reveal that the nebula is not a classic supernova remnant as once commonly thought. Instead, the system is better classified as a pulsar wind nebula. A traditional supernova remnant consists of a blast wave, and debris from the supernova that has been heated to millions of degrees. In a pulsar wind nebula, the system's inner region consists of lower-temperature gas that is heated up to thousands of degrees by the high-energy synchrotron radiation.</blockquote>
In all likelihood, the Crab Nebula is not so different from other supernovae. Even this description hints at the problems of those, such as the outer "debris" being heated to millions of degrees by collision with interstellar gases (which is asinine, since the thin plasmas don't behave like normal gases). In their model of a pulsar wind nebula, the synchrotron radiation heats up the system and causes secondary emissions. But the synchrotron radiation is already a secondary effect of the neutron star's magnetic field. This all amounts to what I call Backdoor EU, as the nebula is the result of magnetic fields and electric currents in either case, but the neutron star comes with all sorts of added complexity, since they are always striving to explain observed electric effects as having a basis in conventional, gravity-driven dynamics (but they get very unconventional anyway).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It is truly via the multiwavelength structure that you can more cleanly comprehend that it's a pulsar wind nebula," Summers said. "This is an important learning objective. You can understand the energy from the pulsar at the core moving out to the synchrotron cloud, and then further out to the filaments of the cage."</blockquote>
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Synchrotron cloud is a way of not saying magnetic field. The term <i>pulsar wind nebula</i> should be interpreted as an inadvertent admission that the mainstream models of supernovae and pulsars are failed. The wind nebula is a way to take the EU explanation but wrap it in conventional terms. Under EU, the plasma torus & jets, the synchrotron radiation, and the pulsating are all easily understood. If you've ever had the pleasure of sitting under a flickering fluorescent light, then you've experienced a pulsating plasma.<br />
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What this articles exemplifies is very good astronomy coupled with very bad science. The visualization of the nebula from several advanced observation platforms is an incredible application of technology. It may seem wasteful then that the results are shoe-horned into a false understanding of the cosmos, but eventually the dam will have to burst.<br />
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<h3>
Astronomers Spot Distant Galaxy Group Driving Ancient Cosmic Makeover (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/astronomers-spot-distant-galaxy-group-driving-ancient-cosmic-makeover">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
<blockquote>
An international team of astronomers funded in part by NASA has found the farthest galaxy group identified to date. Called EGS77, the trio of galaxies dates to a time when the universe was only 680 million years old, or less than 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years.
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More significantly, observations show the galaxies are participants in a sweeping cosmic makeover called reionization. The era began when light from the first stars changed the nature of hydrogen throughout the universe in a manner akin to a frozen lake melting in the spring. This transformed the dark, light-quenching early cosmos into the one we see around us today.</blockquote>
Those first two paragraphs of the NASA article make the claims. For a more technical analysis, we'll look at the referenced article (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.00873.pdf">pdf</a>).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We obtained deep NB [narrow band] imaging observations of the Extended Groth Strip (EGS) field (RA14:19:16 DEC +52:52:13), as part of the DAWN survey. This is a uniquely deep survey given its sensitivity as well as area coverage, with a primary objective of identifying galaxies at redshift z = 7.7.</blockquote>
The study was setup explicitly to find z = 7.7 galaxies. The narrow band observations were calibrated to detect a wavelength that is equivalent to a know UV emission line of hydrogen that has been redshifted into infrared. They also considered other observations of the candidate galaxies in visible and near-infrared spectra.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The data reduction was primarily done using the NEWFIRM science data reduction pipeline. However, for generating the final stack of all the images produced by the pipeline (sky subtracted, cosmic rays cleaned, re-projected) we used our own scripts to remove bad frames that were visually inspected in order to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of astronomical objects.</blockquote>
This is vague and questionable. What scripts were used, and what data was considered to be bad? Would an independent researcher be able to duplicate their findings given the same data?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Each of our candidates had to satisfy all of the following criteria: 1) 5σ detection in the NB filter, 2) 3σ significant narrowband excess (compared to the F125W image), and 3) non-detection (< 2σ) in the individual optical images (F606W, F814W). Criteria 1 & 2 ensure real emission line sources while criterion 3 eliminates most low-redshift sources.</blockquote>
To clarify the criteria 1) the signal in the target wavelength must be very strong, 2) if the signal is much stronger than the near-IR signal, it must indicate emissions lines, and 3) if visible light is not detected, it is proof of a high-redshift source.<br />
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The second and third criteria both depend on assumptions. There are objects in the sky that shine brightly in infrared only, such as <a href="http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/deepsky/infrared/obs_en.htm">CW Leo</a>, which is interpreted to be a highly obscured red dwarf star located right here in our own galaxy.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To measure the photometric redshifts, we made use of spectral energy distribution (SEDs) templates. We obtained the best-fit SEDs using EAZY which provides photometric redshift probability distribution p(z) by finding the best-fitting combination of redshifted galaxy spectral templates to the observed photometry.</blockquote>
The most abused word in all of astrophysics is <i>measurement</i>. Here they say the redshift is measured, which is not true. They have used modeling software to determine redshift probabilities based on the data. The data is a strong signal at a wavelength of a strong emission line of hydrogen as it would be observed at a redshift of 7.7, and several weak & null signals. The result then is a redshift of 7.7, as would obviously be the result for such a setup. What else would be possible? This all amounts to data laundering. A few photometric data points have been transformed into a spectral signal model, from which a redshift has been "measured." If CW Leo was much dimmer, it may well be assigned a 7.7 redshift by this method.<br />
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The paper goes on to provide direct spectrographic data which seems to confirm the redshift, and some other analysis. If the spectrographic data is sound, why bother with the faulty probability modeling at all? Why not go straight to the spectrograph for candidates that fit their criteria? I suspect the authors felt compelled to make some novel contributions besides simply matching a finding in one project with data from another.<br />
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<h3>
Famous Black Hole Has Jet Pushing Cosmic Speed Limit (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/famous-black-hole-has-jet-pushing-cosmic-speed-limit.html">link</a>)</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For years, astronomers have observed radiation from a jet of high energy particles – powered by the black hole – blasting out of the center of M87. They have studied the jet in radio, optical, and X-ray light, including with Chandra. And now by using Chandra observations, researchers have seen that sections of the jet are moving at nearly the speed of light.</blockquote>
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Anytime cosmologists talk about observations pushing theoretical limits, there is almost certainly an error. In this case, the limits have actually been broken, and are explained away as an illusion of general relativity. Further, the cosmic speed limit is said to have been broken (or nearly so) by the infamous M87 black hole. It's always fun to watch them explain why black holes are the opposite of black - emitting copious amounts of the most powerful types of radiation - and the opposite of holes - pushing matter away at the highest possible velocities. As usual, they take time to explain the basic premises of why black holes are neither black nor holes.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When matter gets close enough to a black hole, it enters into a swirling pattern called an accretion disk. Some material from the inner part of the accretion disk falls onto the black hole and some of it is redirected away from the black hole in the form of narrow beams, or jets, of material along magnetic field lines. Because this infall process is irregular, the jets are made of clumps or knots that can sometimes be identified with Chandra and other telescopes.</blockquote>
There are no magnetic field lines in nature. Saying that particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines shows that they are grasping to explain the unexpectedly coherent jets which extend millions of light years into the cosmos.<br />
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By observing the changes in the jets over time, they estimated their velocities and came up with some surprising numbers.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The researchers used Chandra observations from 2012 and 2017 to track the motion of two X-ray knots located within the jet about 900 and 2,500 light years away from the black hole. The X-ray data show motion with apparent speeds of 6.3 times the speed of light for the X-ray knot closer to the black hole and 2.4 times the speed of light for the other.</blockquote>
Anyone's initial reaction to such a statement would be that something is wrong with the measurements. However, NASA has explained the aberration as an artifact of general relativity.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“One of the unbreakable laws of physics is that nothing can move faster than the speed of light,” said co-author Brad Snios, also of the CfA. “We haven’t broken physics, but we have found an example of an amazing phenomenon called superluminal motion.”
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Superluminal motion occurs when objects are traveling close to the speed of light along a direction that is close to our line of sight. The jet travels almost as quickly towards us as the light it generates, giving the illusion that the jet’s motion is much more rapid than the speed of light. In the case of M87, the jet is pointing close to our direction, resulting in these exotic apparent speeds. </blockquote>
That's a lot of complexity, when other factors could be at play. For one, the galaxy may be closer than believed, with a larger angle of jets. Or, it may just be that the image analysis is junk, which I believe to be the case. The NASA article links to related paper (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.04330.pdf">pdf</a>).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Chandra HRC-I observations were examined for evidence of proper motion in the jet of M87. Any changes are expected to be subtle at the resolution of Chandra as movement at the speed of light over a 5 yr time span in M87 would produce a shift of only ∼ 0.02′′. In the difference map (Figure 1, bottom left), the outward shift of a knot with constant brightness would produce positive residuals (blue) at its outer margin and negative residuals (red) at its inner margin. These features can be seen in the difference image of Knot D, providing clear evidence that it has moved outward along the axis of the jet. No other knot shows such clear evidence of movement, although this may be attributed in part to significant changes in brightness, such as those seen in HST-1 and Knot A.</blockquote>
Assuming that the motion of the knots is equal in velocity to the movement of the particles (which is questionable), then those motions would be very "subtle" over 5 years at the resolutions provided by Chandra. So what we see is the normal process, where signals are massaged out of noisy data by statistical methods, and then those outcomes trumpeted as actual data. In this case, only one of the knots - Knot D - was observed to have clearly drifted in the expected direction, thus it was used for the analysis. (Some people would call that cherry-picking the data.) The knot nearest the galactic center, HST-1, was analyzed using statistical modeling techniques.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The proper motion results from Section 4 provide two equally probable interpretations of the system. The first interpretation is that the measurements are due to motion of the X-ray knots, while the second assumes that brightening and/or fading of substructure within the knots gives the appearance of motion at Chandra’s resolution.</blockquote>
Supposedly this is resolved by comparing to archival Hubble imagery and showing that the knot drifts were congruent in both datasets. What question that is supposed to answer is beyond me, but it does raise another: what is the point of the x-ray imagery then, if it merely confirms what was already observed by Hubble?<br />
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Interestingly, the conclusions section takes on an assumption we challenged earlier.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our determination of the minimum magnetic field strength from the synchrotron cooling model relies on the same electron population being responsible for the X-ray emission at both observing epochs, requiring the knot material to move at relativistic speeds between the observations. This is noteworthy because it implies that the speeds of the jet knots reflect bulk relativistic motion of jet plasma, not just of a disturbance, such as a wave or shock front in the jet. To avoid this conclusion, the jet plasma emitting at the initial knot position would have to cool even faster than assumed, requiring a substantially greater magnetic field. Since the required field strength would then be larger than the equipartition value, this seems unlikely. The simplest conclusion is that the motion of the jet knots directly reflects the bulk speed of the jet plasma</blockquote>
Suddenly they're worried about simplest conclusions! The trend these days is that the scientists are perpetually being shown to have underestimated the effects of magnetic and electric fields. The simplest conclusion is actually that the estimates of equipartition values (performed in 2005) are not accurate. The insistence that knot velocities and particle velocities must be the same is not sound. There's no reason why they can't be an artifact of the larger plasma sheath structures, rather than the individual particles themselves (except their need to validate the black-hole accretion theory). For instance, the northern lights put on mesmerizing displays of dancing wisps of glowing and pulsating atmospheric plasmas. No one believes that the observed movements reflect the velocities of the inbound particles. It's understood that they are an artifact of the electric circuit as a whole.<br />
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Also significant is what is missing from the paper. Despite the bold headlines of a cosmic speed limit being "pushed," and the PI claiming, “Our work gives the strongest evidence yet that particles in M87's jet are actually traveling at close to the cosmic speed limit”, there is never a calculation for a near-c value. The calculations are for greater-than-c values, and it's just assumed that they are really near-c and the math would work out of anyone bothered to do it. While the results - if accurate - are evidence of relativistic jets, that much has been known since the mid 1950s when the synchrotron radiation was measured. The results here don't seem to offer any refinement on what is known about them.<br />
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We'll finish by analyzing how they finished.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The preference for the synchrotron cooling model together with the agreement in positions and speeds between the X-ray and optical/UV emission provide a strong case that the observed knot speeds reflect the relativistic speed of the jet plasma, not just of a disturbance propagating along the jet.</blockquote>
No, this is not a strong case at all. This paper has taken weak signals, cherry-picked data where it fit expectations, and applied statistical modeling where it didn't. The argument for particle speeds equaling knot speed is based on estimates of magnetic field strength made a decade and a half ago. Most importantly, there is nothing in the paper about particles being determined to be moving near the speed of light, and yet that is the headline that NASA promoted. That is, even if the paper wasn't junk, the NASA headline would <i>still</i> be a lie.</div>
onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-52823790039057602702020-01-12T09:23:00.001-08:002020-01-12T09:23:17.899-08:00There Are No Open CommunitiesOne of Z's best posts yet was <a href="http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=19518">Open And Closed</a> from earlier this week. It begins with the main thesis.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Communities, by definition are closed.</blockquote>
Of all the lies being promoted in the Disinformation Era, the myth of openness is probably the most dangerous; the one that will cause the most pain in the long run. For all our technological achievements, modern western society is not very sophisticated, as it has forgotten what the Greeks called logos - which embodies an understanding of limits and proportions. Virtues taken to the extreme are vices. Too much of a good thing is always a bad thing. Farmers want rain, but not too much. You want the bath water to be hot, but not too hot. A society can be either too open, or too closed. Ideally it should be open enough to prevent stagnation, but not open to invasion or abuse. The ten million Swedes in Sweden can let in ten million Arabs and still be Sweden. The society must be closed enough to maintain itself, in the way cells close themselves off with cell membranes, but allow for the passage of necessary materials. In nature, there is no equivalent of an open society.<br />
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Openness in modern society is not a virtue; not only because it is applied without limit, but because it is applied selectively, which means it deployed as a weapon. In the US, there are multitudes of communities permitted for all races but one. When students at the University of Illinois attempted to for a white student's association - similar to the many dozens of racial organizations that already existed - it sparked national outrage and they backed down. The LGBTQP pantheon of celebrated sexual identities is difficult to track, as new identities are constantly created in Gender Studies' PhD dissertations. The reason for the unwieldy list is that it is promoted as a whitelist, but is really a blacklist. It could simply be called the AF - or Anti-Family - alliance. LGBTQP is open to all forms of sexuality except traditional family values, which means LGBTQP is actually a closed community.<br />
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Similarly, all colleges and corporations have organizations that explicitly promote the careers of women. Male equivalents are not tolerated...there many not be any at all. Under rule of Equality, Girls Scouts is a community for girls, but Boy Scouts is not a community for boys.<br />
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Most alarming is that white countries are not permitted, but all other races and ethnicities are permitted a homeland. There is no great outcry that China is a Chinese country or Saudi Arabia is Arabian. They say America is a melting pot on stolen land, but that is a lie because European countries are not allowed an ethnic heritage either. Brexit was widely denounced as racist because many leave votes were motivated by immigration reform. The rule is that no white communities are allowed, anywhere, in any context. England is not for the English, America is not for the Americans. The single exception to the rule depends on whether Jews are classified as whites or as Semites. In the future, whites wishing to organize should pick a particular ethnicity. For instance, the University does have one white RSO, which is a Polish club. Thus, the white students should have attempted to register an English club, or German club, with the understanding that it is an RSO for Americans, other Anglos, and perhaps Germanics at large.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-25308972524082932342020-01-10T06:09:00.002-08:002020-01-10T19:15:02.299-08:00The 72-Hour RuleThe rule of thumb is that, if the world is up in a hysteria about something Trump did, give it about three days before joining the chorus. The response to the Soleimani assassination has interestingly muddled. We're used to hear the mainstream media operate on a common frequency, often co-ordinating on the verbiage of their headlines and whatnot. Following the strike, responses ranged from a refusal to condemn but vague questioning of Trump's ability to handle the situation, to full-on renunciations of American imperialism. The narrative now seems to be that Trump should have informed Congress <i>before</i> authorizing the strike. Of course, that would not actually be possible, as the Democrats would leak the top secret information in whatever way would derail Trump's decision.<br />
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It's not particularly instructive to over-analyze the mainstream media response, since we know they'll simply report in whatever way they believe will be most damaging to the president. Let's look at someone more on our side of things. The Economic Collapse blog (linked on sidebar) is prone to hyperbole and doom scenarios. Let's look at the headlines that unfolded in the course of about a week.<br />
<ul>
<li>Iran, It’s Your Move – Trump’s Takedown Of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani Is Likely To Start A Global War</li>
<li>Iran Vows Revenge Against The United States, And The Phrase “World War 3” Is Now Trending…</li>
<li>Why Is Iran Flying A Blood Red Flag Over A Famous Mosque That Is Directly Associated With The Mahdi?</li>
<li>Americans Are Debating About Whether We Will Go To War With Iran, But The Iranians Say The War Has Already Started</li>
<li>Welcome To World War 3 – Just Pray That You Will Be Able To Survive It</li>
<li>Everybody In America Should Stand Up And Applaud President Trump, Because He Just Changed The Course Of History</li>
</ul>
<div>
Doom, doom, doom...Trump's a savior! That last one begins,</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If someone else had been in the White House, this crisis could have easily turned out much differently. Sadly, most Americans have no idea that we were literally on the brink of the beginning of World War 3 this week.</blockquote>
While tensions were high and war was certainly possible, there were many indications that the various involved factions were posturing and war was not the likely outcome. The first hint came immediately after the event, when Iran pledged to take the matter before the UN. That is not an indication of a side determined to plunge into a very costly - perhaps regime-ending - war. Then the event was condemned by the Iraqi Parliament - in a non-binding resolution in which the Sunnis and Kurds abstained. Not quite the strong reaction the media was making it out to be. Then, when Iran sent a volley of missiles towards bases hosting US troops, many were certain that it was the beginning of a hot war. But the missiles caused little damage and no casualties (similar to Trump's missile attacks on Syria a couple years ago).<br />
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The posturing is as follows:<br />
<ul>
<li>Trump was determined not to have his Benghazi moment, and established a red line that US embassies are to be left alone</li>
<li>The Iraqi Shia were compelled to show an effort to rebuke US attacks on Iran</li>
<li>The Iranians could not offer a meek non-response. Their leadership can sell their phony military response being a strong enough show of strength to cause the Great Satan to back down in its aggression</li>
</ul>
<div>
The result is a scenario where all sides can achieve their goals without war, which no one actually desires. Trump didn't pull back the US from the brink of war, because we were never at the brink of war.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Also, very interesting to note, is that Israel broke ranks, declaring that the US would be alone if war broke out with Iran. That is a curious development, and I don't currently know what to make of it.</div>
onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-46945990678975644062020-01-07T20:56:00.002-08:002020-01-07T20:58:12.060-08:00The RIP Of Habeas CorpusMartin Armstrong reports that Julian Assange is being left to waste away in solitary confinement, with the intention that he will never be publicly tried.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The US prosecutors are conspiring with the British to ensure that Julian Assange never goes to trial and what is taking place is the collapse of civility and Justice which has become sheer vengeance and political prosecution. The British will not allow independent doctors to visit Assange meanwhile they have been keeping him like Jeffrey Epstein in solitary confinement. This is where they keep people who are really political enemies of the states who will never be given a fair trial.</blockquote>
Rulers don't clamor for power to put themselves on trial, and do not subject themselves to the rule of law any more than is necessary. (In a corrupt system, that means hardly at all.) The principle applies to the system more so than individuals; it does not mean that dissidents are always tried, for example. In a fair trial, the prosecution is exposed for public scrutiny as much as the defendant. If the government makes someone out to be a public enemy for decades and then imprisons him for years, they better have a case to make. Otherwise the tyranny is exposed, the illusion of justice fades.<br />
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The government wants to imprison Assange and make an example of him. They don't want to drag him to court to charge him with first-degree journalism, and they absolutely do not want him put under oath to testify in regards to Russiagate. Instead, they'll maneuver to detain him indefinitely, with no opportunity for defense. Habeas corpus, the bedrock of the Anglo legal tradition, is no more.<br />
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Other examples abound. A Navy Seal team was raided bin Laden's compound with orders to kill. A public trial of 9/11 was never going to happen. Similar was the recent assassination of the Iranian general. Nabbing him was not an option; not necessarily because of technical limitations, but because putting a foreign military leader on trial for interfering with America's imperial projects is not possible when the official line is still that we went to Iraq to liberate its people, who now hold sovereign domain over their territory.<br />
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If Epstein really was a Mossad agent running a blackmail ring in America, then that dirty laundry was certainly never going to air. Hillary Clinton evaded the courts too, and Comey made a mockery of the justice system in the process by detailing all the reasons she should be prosecuted before announcing that no reasonable prosecutor would take up the case. He was right: no reasonable lawyer would dare violate the edict that the rulers don't go to trial. No one associated with FISAgate - which was treasonous - has been charged or even terribly inconvenienced. They won't be tried because the people in charge don't want a play-by-play court transcripts of how the Democrats and their federal allies were able to fabricate intel and then launder it to the point that a high-ranking Senator was passing it directly to the director of the FBI and an elected president was subjected to a special counsel shakedown has his first term. If you are ever tempted to commit a crime, choose one such that its revelation will embarrass the ruling class. You'll skate.<br />
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It's the reason the Democrats ramrodded an impeachment vote through the House only to freeze stiff at the reality of passing it on to the Senate for a trial. It will never go to trial because that would be a disaster for these enemies of truth. They are trying to leverage the illusion of pending legal proceedings to gain access to Trump's records (and the classified findings of the Mueller report) to gain something damaging to use in the upcoming election. They are (once again) using the federal justice system to execute their opposition research for them. The desperation must be high to risk the one outcome that the corrupt rulers avoid at all cost: to be subjected to a public trial - even as prosecutors.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-42996482402541055442020-01-06T18:27:00.000-08:002020-01-06T18:28:15.076-08:00Contrabang! #34 How We'd All Die Instantly<h3>
Is Betelgeuse About To Explode? (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/is-betelgeuse-about-to-explode-84d4a7badf8e">link</a>)</h3>
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One of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse has recently dimmed by a surprising amount. This has prompted scientists to surmise that the orb may be about to go supernova. It is the kind of upside-down logic that only an academic could love. The theory goes that supernova is caused when the star hits a critical mass of fissionable material, just as happens in a nuclear bomb. In bombs, the collapse is caused by carefully placed and precisely time explosives. In stars, they reckon, it occurs when they run out of fissionable material. The lower thermal output reduces "radiative pressure" and the star collapses under its own gravity, and eventually goes boom. So stars explode when they run out of fuel, is the short description.</div>
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However, they say that even if the star is going supernova, it could be hundreds of thousands of years until the event happens. Thus, they can't be disproven in any case. However, I would offer a more general prediction: if a known star goes supernova, it will brighten, not dim, prior to the event.</div>
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Antimatter Mystery Likely Due To Pulsars, Not Dark Matter (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/antimatter-mystery-likely-due-to-pulsars-not-dark-matter-5ffc04f4d73f">link</a>)</h3>
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This article contains a lot of words of a highly technical nature. The only ones that really matter are in the last sentence.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Right now, it appears that pulsars may be responsible for 100% of the observed excess, requiring scientists to go back to the drawing board for a direct signal that reveals our Universe’s elusive dark matter.</blockquote>
Another theory of dark matter has been shot down. They must be running thin on them at this point.<br />
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<h3>
This Is How We’d All Die Instantly If The Sun Suddenly Went Supernova (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/this-is-how-wed-all-die-instantly-if-the-sun-suddenly-went-supernova-c7383fba5b63">link</a>) </h3>
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A favorite past time of Ethan and his ilk is to fantasize about the cataclysmic destruction of all humanity. This one does not disappoint.</div>
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While our Sun isn’t massive enough to experience [a supernova], it’s a fun and macabre thought experiment to imagine what would happen if it did. Yes, we’d all die in short order, but not from either the blast wave or from radiation. Instead, the neutrinos would get us first.</blockquote>
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Gosh, that <i>is</i> fun.</div>
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That energy goes into a mix of radiation (photons), the kinetic energy of the material in the now-exploding stellar material, and neutrinos. All three of these are more than capable of ending any life that’s managed to survive on an orbiting planet up to that point, but the big question of how we’d all die if the Sun went supernova depends on the answer to one question: who gets there first?</blockquote>
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I bet $100 it's photon radiation. I hope I'm right!</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But any living creature would surely die even before the light or the blast wave from the supernova arrived; they’d never see their demise coming. Instead, the neutrinos — which interact with matter so rarely that an entire star, to them, functions like a pane of glass does to visible light — simply speed away omnidirectionally, from the moment of their creation, at speeds indistinguishable from the speed of light.</blockquote>
Ah! I was wrong, but that's a way cooler way for humans to go extinct.<br />
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It’s horrifying to think that an event as fascinating and destructive as a supernova, despite all the spectacular effects it produces, would kill anything nearby before a single perceptible signal arrived, but that’s absolutely the case with neutrinos. </blockquote>
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The only reason he finds it horrifying that humans would not be subjected to awaiting their disastrous fate is that he wouldn't have the opportunity to gloat about being right about physics before everyone gets blasted to smithereens. These people fantasize about hearing everyone remark "you were right the whole time, Ethan; we should have listened" just before being internally incinerated by an elusive form of stellar radiation.</div>
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Ask Ethan: Did God Create The Universe? (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-did-god-create-the-universe-91a274ea2eb5">link</a>)</h3>
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An interesting question to take on, since the ultimate point of the moderns is to remove God and appoint themselves as deity.</div>
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Science cannot prove the existence of God, but it cannot disprove God either; it can only disprove the notion of a specific, poorly conceived God. If you claim that your God lives in the clouds, you can disprove that God by simply observing the clouds. If you claim that God lives in our Universe, you can disprove that God by observing the entire Universe. But if your God exists in an extra dimension, before cosmic inflation, or outside of space and time altogether, neither proof nor disproof is possible.</blockquote>
A reasonable scientific stance on God. But he's not done yet.<br />
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In a fundamental way, it is purely a matter of what your faith is. All we can control, at the end of the day, is how we treat one another. Do we welcome those who believe different things than we do into our hearts, communities, and lives? Or do we shun, exclude, and “other” them?</blockquote>
Ethan, a guy I know is moving to Portland. He's a neo-Nazi who believes the Holocaust was a hoax, but he's really tidy and nice. Can he stay with you for a bit while he gets himself established in your community?<br />
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Regardless of what you believe, I have the same advice for you: choose kindness. It costs nothing, while benefitting the giver, the recipient, and those who simply witness it. Whether you say that God made us or not, I would say the same thing: the wonders and joys of science and the Universe are for you, exactly as you are, too.</blockquote>
And there is the materialist's prayer. Whether God exists or not doesn't matter, because <i>you</i> the individual can choose what you believe and that is all that is important. It doesn't matter if there is God because man is God.<br />
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The problems with the materialistic approach, of course, have been detailed endlessly on this blog. Not only that, but the major tenets of that belief system - that the cosmos evolved by random processes, and lifeforms by random genetic mutations - are not supported by evidence. Thus, his own "neutral" viewpoint is actually a religious position in itself. It is every bit as religious to say that life evolved as a quirk of nature as to say that it was created by a higher intelligence.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-22713471145893354762020-01-06T04:51:00.003-08:002020-01-06T04:51:43.174-08:00Equality is AqualityWith the fall of Christianity in the west, politics has become the major religion, the DIE values (diversity, inclusion, equality) have become the moral code, and voting has become the holiest of rituals. As a general rule, the rejection of reasonable religion ensures the adoption of unreasonable religion. The old religions were tempered to co-exist with their societies so that the benefits were useful and the costs were limited. Christian doctrine reduces conflict spiraling and encourages co-operation and truthfulness. It's major ritual is weekly communion. Progressive doctrine encourages rage, blame, and envy. It's major ritual is voting, which transforms a system of rationale societal decision making into a display of piety. Democracy is possible under Christianity (perhaps), but it must fail under Progressivism.<br />
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Under the tenets of Equality, outcomes are expected to be equal since there are no innate differences between any groups. Thus, any perceived inequality is the result of wrong-doing. Not only can a group with some perceived advantage be punished on principle, they <i>must</i> be punished to uphold proper moral order. Businesses - which seek a profit - are assumed to be engaged in cheating. Property owners are assumed to have stolen their possessions. Thus, we see in liberal strongholds a ceaseless attack on business, which adversely affect the smallest and most vulnerable businesses that cannot afford the prog public relations and lobbying/bribing operations of the big corporations. If you asked Progressives if they thought public policy should favor locally owned businesses or global corporations, every last one of them will say locally owned businesses. And yet they implement the policy that has the opposite effect, because they aren't voting rationally.<br />
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In California, parcel taxes have become popular, which are arbitrary and usually regressive taxes levied on real estate used to raise money for various causes. The California Supreme Court has ruled against them, and so they must be passed by a two-thirds vote - hardly a problem in places like San Francisco. Some are now blaming those taxes for the recent report of <a href="https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/more-than-400-san-francisco-restaurants-close-in-2019-report/2208296/">four hundred restaurants closing in San Francisco</a>. Perhaps that isn't a lot in such a populous city, but the witness accounts are that it's part of an observable trend.<br />
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“The trend is more restaurants are closing than are opening and that’s historic,” said Chris Tavelli from Pause and Yield Wine Bars. “I’ve never seen that in my ten years in the restaurant business.”</blockquote>
Witness testimonies also indicate that properties are remaining vacant longer. Restaurant owners blame the business environment of the city for the hard times.<br />
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Restauranteurs said many factors are to blame, like the high cost of operating in San Francisco, high crime rates, dirty streets and long wait times for permits. Plus, new challenges in this digital age like the ease of being able to order food online. “All these tech companies with free food and wine available to their employees day and night,” said Tavelli.</blockquote>
Offering lunch is not some new "digital-age" innovation, nor are the tech companies to blame. They're the ones keeping the region afloat, and they're doing what they must to retain talent. They can't say, "Come work in San Francisco. We're near some great restaurants. Lunch will cost you $30. Watch out for all the poop and needles."<br />
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I've known tech workers who were lured out to the Bay Area by job offers from prestigious corporations like Google, only to return back to the Midwest...sometimes within a year! Most tech workers are number-savvy enough to realize that the high-dollar west coast salaries are a worse deal and, if not, they quickly learn upon arrival. Companies that offer on-site services like reasonably priced food and complimentary buses to the suburbs are trying to spare their employees from the worst aspects of an area that's grown a reputation as a terrible place to start a family.<br />
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Equality means we can't have nice things, because nice things cause envy and claims of unfairness, to which the hordes of Progressives swoop in to fix things via more government intervention. However, the approach fails because the tech workers - already raked over the coals for rent - can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars a week eating out, and the restaurants don't enjoy Apple-level profit margins. The Progressives don't care, and will vote the same even when they know what the reality is. A <a href="https://voat.co/v/news/3593235/22004055">Voat comment</a> is enlightening.<br />
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It really is only a matter of time and completely unstoppable. People in the Bay Area are so intensely politicized that they unconsciously feel voting to be purely a moral issue. They don't vote to increase School funds via Parcel Taxes because it makes sense, it's because it is a moral issue, and most importantly, it is a moral issue on two fronts. One is obvious, but the other is they believe it is always moral to vote against the interests of property owners. They seriously would vote to just raise Parcel Taxes for no reason, as they would see it as moral. I've even talk to real estate agents about this who absolutely know what I'm saying is true, but will only respond with, "well, we all have opinions." You see, they know it's going to destroy everything, but they also don't want to transgress their politicized morality.</blockquote>
Stupidity is not to blame here. Even in the absence of stupidity, the irrational behavior persists. The real estate agent is probably taking the smart approach because a transgression against the moral code could be very bad for business. The problem is the Progressive religion and its DIE fervor. The real tragedy isn't watching the great American city of San Francisco collapse, but watching all those yuppie prog voters scurrying to Austin and Denver, turning those locales a solid shade of dark blue. Flee for capitalism, vote for socialism.</div>
onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-33609986389657546322020-01-02T18:09:00.000-08:002020-01-02T21:05:49.874-08:00Futurism Is HistoryIn Zman's post T<a href="http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=19483">he Future Of Futurism</a>, he observes that futurism has largely petered out. Come to think of it, I haven't heard mention of Kurzweil or his imminent technological singularity in some time now. It used to be something you'd hear reference to from time to time in various places. I'd suppose it's because everything is too politicized these days. Basement-dwelling techno-dweebs aren't taking the time to fantasize about our future techno-utopia when Literally Hitler Except Worse holds power. In a society where the majority believe we are headed towards a violent civil war, no one is taking the time to muse about our glorious shared future.<br />
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Z takes a slightly different approach.<br />
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One reason for this sudden lack of interest in the future could be that we are living in a simulation, specifically a quantum simulation. The beings running this simulation decided we needed to focus on other things.</blockquote>
Well, that's a little out there. And, it's useless analysis, since it could be used to explain anything. <i>Why does anything happen? Because the mystical beings who run our simulation wanted it that way.</i> It's virtually the same as attributing all things to God, but even more religious than invoking the Christian God - who is not omnipotent. It would be more akin to Allah, as Muslims explain everything away as <i>God wills it</i>.<br />
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The main argument against this being a simulation is that a race of beings that sophisticated would not have created a simulation this stupid. They would put us in a much more interesting experiment or throw the whole thing in the trash.</blockquote>
That is not the main argument against the life-as-simulation hypothesis, nor is it a valid argument at all. How does he know what simulation those advanced beings would create? Only if he is as sophisticated as they could he know the answer, so it is an exercise in hubris to make such claims. Same with the claim that we would be put in a more interesting simulation. Things lately have been very interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese curse. In fact, political dramas like House Of Cards, despite all dramatic license, failed to match the intrigue and ironies of the political drama that was and is actually unfolding. If a more interesting simulation exists, then we mere humans have not been able to imagine it.<br />
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On the other hand, this simulation could be a child’s experiment. This world in which we exist is sitting on a child’s dresser like an ant farm. The last few decades were the result of the cat getting into the experiment and breaking some things.</blockquote>
I scoffed when I first heard the suggestion that right-wing dissident politics was inseparable from Christianity, but I find that the evidence increasingly shows me to have been wrong. Look at how Z is bumbling around with this issue. What is he even trying to get at with this musing? It's like there's an inner truth just screaming to get out, and he's grappling to make sense of it within his thought framework. As the world darkens, it becomes clear that Christianity is actually the superior analytical tool. Who is the cat, Z? He has a name, doesn't he?<br />
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I suspect Z fancies himself as too sophisticated to engage in such talk.. but where does that lead him? To liken our reality to the toy of some god-child. It is a far more religious and <i>less</i> sophisticated viewpoint than you'll find in any church. I have to note the analogy with science. The astrophysicists have such an earth-centric view of the cosmos (to see everything as electrically neutral and gravity-dominated, as we experience here) that they've had to concoct all sorts exotic dark and black substances to explain what they are seeing through the telescope. There's a generality here, which is that, in the absence of a reasonable belief system, an unreasonable one will emerge. Obviously that holds in the political sector as well. Z is one of the best cynical minds of the alt-right, and is very good at explaining how we got here. But, what does he replace it with? He makes the same fundamental mistakes they do. If we put Z in charge to fix everything, we'd ultimately wind up in the exact same place.<br />
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Even Jordan Peterson's form of secular Christianity is of more use in explaining the preponderance of evil in the world. Peterson basically acknowledges the Christian description of good & evil, but ascribes it to innate traits of the human psyche. In his viewpoint, the struggle is internal to the individual, rather than a larger struggle between spiritual forces. Well, if Peterson is wrong and Christians are right, then it's not actually possible for a man to stand alone against such powerful forces, and indeed we see that his path leads to great internal torment and drug addiction. That question was settled when the great self-help intellectual checked into rehab. Peterson's description of man living on the edge of order and chaos is certainly more sophisticated and useful than Z's description of cats and ant farms, but even that is not sufficient.<br />
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Futurism has evaporated because of the impending sense of doom all sides. However, I believe that it was due to expire anyway, because it nestles on a few false assumptions. Eventually some distraction was going to arise and give futurism a convenient excuse to fade away. Winston Churchill famously quipped that Americans can be depended on to do the right thing - after they've exhausted all other options. And so we can take heart that a bad idea can only persist for so long. The three major lies on which futurism was built, are as follows.<br />
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<h3>
1. Artificial intelligence is real intelligence</h3>
The premise of artificial intelligence is that the human brain is simply a biological computer, and thus human-like intellect can be duplicated by building a sufficiently powerful mechanical computer. There are problems with the assumption. For one, scientists have known for over 60 years that specific memories can't be located within the brain. The need for sleep is also a mystery.<br />
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The Kurzweil singularity is the belief that you can calculate the processing power of the brain and then build a machine with similar processing power and get the same result. Think of the assumptions being made. What is the complexity of recalling a memory? Well, we can't even know, because we don't know how human memory works. What is the complexity of engaging in abstract thought? For instance, in this article we've shown how Z's cat is analogous to dark matter in that the rejection of a little religion leads necessarily to the adoption of a lot of religion. No supercomputer today is capable of such analogies; it is assumed that with more power they will do so. The technological singularity is a profession of profound belief in the religion of materialism.<br />
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2. Genes are the code of life</h3>
It is understandable why the discovery of DNA led to the widespread belief that we had found the code of life, or even that we would soon gain the godlike power of modifying that code to our wishes. What is less understandable - or less tolerable, perhaps - is that the belief has led to the wholesale rejection of all evidence to the contrary. Genetic mapping has proven that there are not nearly enough genes in the genome, nor has there been enough time for them to have evolved by random chance in the timeframes permitted.<br />
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The truth remains that, despite all the hype and massive funding, we have never created a new gene either through engineering or breeding. Eventually, they will have to stop kidding themselves, and that should happen approximately whenever the funding starts to run dry. The capabilities of genetic engineering are actually pretty limited, and eventually markets will have to wizen up.<br />
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3. Humans landed on the moon in 1969</h3>
The ease and swiftness with which NASA put men on the moon fifty years ago has led to the conviction that space travel is much easier than it really is. There are still many prominent futurists talking of colonizing the moon and Mars, including people like Elon Musk and Mike Pence. As such, the publicized ventures to return to the moon (and even the space station) are encouraging, as the problems they encounter will be instructive. If the federal government has to spend vast sums of money to reveal the false assumptions on which those projects stand, then that is some of the least wasteful spending in the budget. When materialism collapses, along with it will go the naive optimism that man will be colonizing the stars any time soon - but along with it will come the realization that such a fate is not the great tragedy it is made out to be.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-13617324557917596952020-01-02T09:13:00.000-08:002020-01-02T20:18:12.135-08:00Starliner Clock Off By Eleven Hours<div>
NASA has not recently given any updates about the first (and intended to be the last) unmanned test of the Starliner capsule. For that we must turn to <a href="https://spacenews.com/starliner-in-good-shape-after-shortened-test-flight/">SpaceNews</a>.</div>
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The spacecraft’s mission elapsed timer, which is set by communicating with its Atlas 5 rocket prior to liftoff, was off by 11 hours. That caused the spacecraft to think it was on the wrong phase of its mission after separation from the rocket’s upper stage, triggering thruster firings that used excessive amounts of fuel until ground controllers could take over and turn off the thrusters.</blockquote>
I previously opined that the snafu seemed reminiscent of the Mars Climate Orbiter from a couple decades ago, which failed to convert properly between standard and metric units and burned up in the Marsian atmosphere. The revelation of an 11-hour time gap reinforces that opinion. Such a differential implies that this was not the result of clock drift between the launch system and the orbiter, but was likely due to a fundamental mismatch between how they were encoding time - most likely having to do with timezone differences. Coding for timezones and daylight savings is a very bug-prone domain, but issues mostly arise when people try to implement their own logic to handle timezones rather than using the standard libraries. However, that would seem to be irrelevant in an orbiting spacecraft. At the ISS altitude, Starliner would be crossing all 24 timezones about every 90 minutes. Storing timestamps as anything but UTC would be a disaster-prone mistake. The space station itself operates under UTC.<br />
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There is no relevant timezone that is offset 11 hours from UTC. Both UTC +11 and -11 sit out in the middle of the vast Pacific ocean. However, there is an 11-hour time differential between the launch site in Florida and India - where Boeing previously outsourced critical software components of the disastrous 737 Max to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers">$9-an-hour programmers.</a> One possible scenario is that the timestamps were encoded with local timezones: the Atlas V set to the timezone of the launch site and Starliner's hard-coded to the Indian timezone in development and never updated.<br />
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Assuming the anomaly occurred because of a data format mismatch between the two platforms, then who is to blame? Considering that Boeing designed the spacecraft, and that the launch system is a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed, doesn't the blame fall on Boeing? That's the problem with NASA organizing missions among private vendors: there is endless blame-shifting when things go wrong. (It's the same reason I will only book flights directly from airlines. Otherwise getting stranded leads to the further frustration of being subjected to a perpetual loop of finger pointing among the involved parties.) Boeing is certainly looking to shift the blame.<br />
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Why the timer was off, particularly by such a large amount, any why it wasn’t detected prior to launch is not known. “If I knew, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Jim Chilton, senior vice president for Boeing’s space and launch division, at a Dec. 21 briefing. “We are surprised. A very large body of integrated tests, approved by NASA, didn’t surface this.”</blockquote>
If NASA approved the integration tests, the Boeing VP says, then it's their fault if software faults occur. When we look at the metric/standard conversion bug of the failed Marsian probe, the error occurred at the interface of NASA's platform and vendor software. The fault lied with NASA because they provided too loose of a design contract. However, it's too early to say from public statements if the same kind of problem occurred with the more recent problem. Integration tests cannot root out all classes of bugs that may have been written, although they should have ensured that data flow between the two were properly formatted. As long as the data was being properly sent from the launch vehicle to the spaceship, it's possible that no integration test would catch that the spacecraft was then misinterpreting it.<br />
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After landing, NASA leadership stated that the problem, once understood and corrected, would not necessarily prevent Boeing from proceeding with a crewed test flight. “It is not something that is going to prevent us from moving forward quickly,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a post-landing briefing Dec. 22. “We can still move forward quickly. We can get it fixed.” He also suggested, though, that the timer problem might lead to a more thorough review of the Starliner’s overall flight software or other systems.</blockquote>
The two most recent tests have revealed major failures (a parachute failed to deploy during the ground abort test, although we are told it was redundant and would not have endangered the crew). I would not want to be one of the astronauts about to jump into their rocket. They must be very brave.<br />
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While not many outlets have picked this up, <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/12/29/boeing-veers-off-course-in-crucial-starliner-launc.aspx">Motley Fool</a> chimed in from a business perspective.<br />
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If NASA and Boeing are willing to roll the dice, and proceed with a crewed mission to the ISS without redoing the uncrewed test, there's the potential for Boeing to reset the table and (partially, at least) catch up with SpaceX. It would be a risky move for both actors -- and would perhaps attract criticism from space fans, who might accuse NASA of gambling with astronauts' lives to benefit a favored contractor. On the other hand, as astronaut Mann pointed out, having humans in the cockpit might be key to preventing a second failure for Boeing.</blockquote>
The downside of killing a crew of astronauts when already under scrutiny for the deaths of two airliners' worth of passengers is probably steeper than the upside of a successful mission. The 737 Max was the first jet Boeing developed after Diversity because a core company value, and Starliner the first spacecraft. They are learning that hard way that outsourcing critical software is not our strength.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-47192358048535870112020-01-01T17:45:00.002-08:002020-01-01T22:41:56.113-08:00Hindsight Is 2019This New Year's Eve celebrated not only the closing of a year, but of a tumultuous decade. The 2010s will be studied in the same way that we read Plutarch and Cicero to learn of the collapse of the Roman Republic, Thucydides on the fall of the Athenian Empire, or Hugo on the French revolution. In this decade it became clear that the old order - the first democracy in the modern era, which spawned the greatest superpower in all history - has ended. We could debate endlessly about how long American democracy has been a mere illusion, but the more important date would be when that illusion was dispelled, and that has occurred in the past decade.<br />
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The 2010s marked the end of the conspiracy theorist, as numerous leaks and other public events confirmed many allegations of rampant corruption and conspiratorial scheming among the elites. Fringe commentators like Alex Jones were pushed out of social media not because public sentiment had turned against them, but because they were increasingly seen as truthful.<br />
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In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked numerous NSA documents revealing that virtually all communications were being monitored in the US. The liberals, who routinely took to the streets to protest George W. Bush's abuses of power, responded to complete eradication of the 4th Amendment with a collective yawn. It wasn't the <i>what</i> but the <i>who</i> that they were interested in.<br />
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Also in 2013, an IG report revealed that the IRS had been weaponized against certain conservative groups. While the IRS has never ranked highly in popularity surveys, seeing a department full of accountants turned into a political weapon was alarming. At that point, one is forced to wonder which parts of the federal government had <i>not</i> been corrupted.<br />
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Also in 2013, the personal emails of Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal was hacked by the Romanian hacker Guccifer. They revealed that Hillary Clinton had been informed that the real reason for waging war on Libya was the geopolitical interests of some of the European powers - particularly France.<br />
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In 2014, Colorado decriminalized marijuana despite it being rated amongst the most dangerous of substances by the federal government. Going into the new decade, only a handful of states are in compliance with Washington's orders, with full legalization even in the district itself!<br />
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In 2015, the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked to the public. They revealed numerous aspects of corruption and criminality, most notably<br />
<ol>
<li>collusion of the DNC with the media to nominate Clinton over Sanders, to the point of leaking her the questions that would be asked in the CNN-hosted debate</li>
<li>a smoking-gun document of pay-for-play bribery within the Obama administration</li>
<li>that Clinton's campaign staff are literally Satanists</li>
</ol>
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While these crimes and numerous other examples of elections fraud and the deletion of emails under a preservation order went unpunished, the DOJ spent several years investigating Trump and his circle raking for evidence of crimes under the guise of trying to solve the email heist mystery - despite never inspecting the DNC server or interrogating Julian Assange.</div>
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In 2016, the DOJ & FBI engaged in a full-fledged legal coup against Donald Trump. This would include directly embedding spies into the campaign, attempting to plant evidence on his advisors, lying to a FISA court, and laundering illegally obtained and shoddy evidence through FISA warrants, the media, and even the late Senator John McCain. The Washington establishment made it clear that it was they, not the American people, who have the final say in who is allowed to become president.</div>
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From 2016 onward, the mass media engaged in almost systematic self-destruction by a constant barrage of manic conspiracy theories regarding President Trump. The response has been that the most dishonest outlets like CNN have been bleeding viewers, while the less dishonest Fox News has become dominant in nearly every timeslot. </div>
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Similarly, the political establishment has done everything possible to erode the legitimacy on which they themselves stand. The Democrats who threatened at every turn to impeach Trump if there had been Russian collusion, or Ukrainian collusion, or if Mueller was fired, etc., then got impatient and decided to impeach him anyway. We go into the 2020s with an ongoing spectacle that primarily demonstrates to the public that the rule of law is dead in this country. It is all legal warfare which will likely spill into armed warfare.</div>
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Finally, in 2019 notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein - alleged by many to be a key link in a high-level blackmail chain - was arrested at his New York mansion. Many wondered if this was finally the first signs of the corrupt swamp being drained. Instead, Epstein managed to commit suicide as a VIP inmate, after previously attempting suicide and being put on suicide watch, and with cameras that managed to malfunction and guards that neglected their patrol duties nearly all night. This has been too much even for the liberals who normally soak up every lie fed to them by the media, with "Epstein Didn't Kill Himself" jokes running strong from all corners of the political spectrum. In a post-Epstein world, everyone is a conspiracy theorist.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
That is the decade in recap, although I've likely omitted other significant instances of democracy's death on public display. We go into 2020 with fighting words being exchanged between the government and gunowners in northern Virginia - the home of the original civil war. Not only did this decade reveal the transition from a democratic order to one of open legal warfare, it ends with the first hints of the conflict going hot. The old Chinese curse goes, "May you live in interesting times." Here's hoping that the 2020's will be positively bland and boring in comparison to the past decade, although it's becoming hard to envision what that scenario would be.<br />
<br />
Update: I did forget one event I meant to include, and it is the most important of all for its symbolism. What could be a more concise description of the past decade than this image?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBJyv90uHtvJKj-RCTsO485Zm8uvMa9FyQVzZ7it59DhIoE-6GM5BrCpJM9NHB5GaPA09VHit_ofzCFZd3Y0bVO5vmWneFtqUwGJChytDh3a5zJODt05dYaJOVmGKKSGUZQunfMOJROAw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-15+at+9.50.23+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="710" data-original-width="1102" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBJyv90uHtvJKj-RCTsO485Zm8uvMa9FyQVzZ7it59DhIoE-6GM5BrCpJM9NHB5GaPA09VHit_ofzCFZd3Y0bVO5vmWneFtqUwGJChytDh3a5zJODt05dYaJOVmGKKSGUZQunfMOJROAw/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-15+at+9.50.23+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-81057289791853483922019-12-29T22:43:00.000-08:002019-12-29T22:43:05.807-08:00Contrabang #33 Dark ChargeOutput for this blog suffered as I got lazy over the holidays, but we're back with a fairly long 2-week version of <i>Contrabang!</i> and posts should return to the normal pace.<br />
<br />
<h3>
This Is How Eta Carinae Survived A Near-Supernova Eruption (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/this-is-how-eta-carinae-survived-a-near-supernova-eruption-57acfa29604c">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy than a supernova. ... The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive.</blockquote>
The hardest part of being a modern astronomer is explaining away all the evidence that doesn't fit. The standard model for supernovae is that they are sudden explosions caused by runaway nuclear fusion who power output temporarily matches that of entire galaxies. The star is destroyed in the process, with vast quantities of the outer shell scattered into the cosmos, and the heavier core collapses into a neutron star or black hole.<br />
<br />
The Milky Way's Eta Carina system is puzzling because it exhibits the power of a supernovae - and many of their visual characteristics - but also violates a number of rules.<br />
<ol>
<li>The power increased gradually over years</li>
<li>The event has occurred at least three times since the 19th century, with many small-scale variations within the larger cycle</li>
<li>The core star has not been destroyed</li>
</ol>
</div>
Scientists are at a loss to explain how a minor star can go through a supernova-like event and emerge as a much more powerful system.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In 2005, observations revealed that Eta Carinae isn’t a single star, but a binary system in a ~5.5 year mutual orbit.</blockquote>
These statements must be handled carefully, because it is natural to assume they mean that a binary companion was directly observed. Rather, a binary system has been assumed in response to some periodicity in the spectral signal, but no other star has actually been observed.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The 5.5 year binary orbit of the Eta Carinae system consists of a hydrogen-rich star of approximately 100 solar masses in orbit with a hydrogen-free star of 30 solar masses. This type of mass inversion, where the less massive star has lost its hydrogen, suggests a mass transfer that’s difficult to explain.</blockquote>
A 5.5 year periodicity in hydrogen emissions lines is what drove the hypothesis for two stars: one hydrogen-rich and the other hydrogen-depleted. However he admits that even the preferred hypothesis of a binary system is "difficult to explain." Which means they don't actually know and they are resulting to the normal trick of picking what is believed to be the <i>least bad</i> hypothesis and promoting that as scientific knowledge.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It’s possible that a specific cataclysm triggered this outburst: the devouring of a third star.</blockquote>
It's starting to become common to see unexpected celestial events explained by adding stars to systems and invoking complex gravitational scenarios. Eta Carinae had been observed for at least 150 years before the nova event, having been described by Edmond Halley in 1677. There was never any observation of a second or third star. It will be interesting to see what is proposed in response to any future eruptions.<br />
<br />
<h3>
NASA’s NICER Mission Reveals An Unexpected Neutron Star Surprise (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/nasas-nicer-mission-reveals-an-unexpected-neutron-star-surprise-c9a4c2fdb91e">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
We discussed the NICER results in the very first installment of the <i>NASA News</i> segment. Now Ethan has something to say about it, although you already know what his position is.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The low-energy X-ray observatory measures timing signals down to 300 nanoseconds and at unprecedented sensitivities.</blockquote>
True.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
NICER enables measurements of neutron stars’ sizes, masses, cooling times, stabilities, and internal structures.</blockquote>
False. <i>Measurements</i> implies a direct observation. NICER does not directly measure any of the attributes listed. Those numbers are coming from models, which can be just about anything.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For one pulsar in particular, J0030+0451, they determined its mass (1.35 Suns) and diameter (25.7 km) explicitly.</blockquote>
Not just false, but a lie. The mass and diameter were not determined explicitly, nor did the researchers convey it as such. The numbers come implicitly from a probabilistic model based on the pulse data and many assumptions about how pulsars work. If Ethan is indeed an expert in this field, then he is a liar.<br />
<br />
For context, when I read the original article, it became immediately apparent what was going on when they described the diameter of a star a over a thousand light years in increments of tenths of a mile. We can't even resolve our own sun to that degree. Apparently, that was not obvious to Ethan, who thinks they actually measured the radius of an asteroid-sized star quadrillions of miles away to a resolution of hundreds of feet.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They detected “hot spots” on the surface and constructed the first-ever neutron star map.</blockquote>
Another lie. From the <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.05702.pdf">original paper</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In this paper we assume that there are two separate hot regions on the stellar surface; this choice was motivated by the presence of two distinct pulses in the observed (phase-folded) pulse-profile. However, we considered a number of different possible configurations for the shapes and temperature functions of the hot regions: circular spots, annuli (rings, both centered and off-centered), and crescents; with one or two temperature components. These choices were motivated by contemporary theories for pulsar surface heating distributions as a result of magnetospheric return currents.</blockquote>
It says it right there. They didn't detect hot spots. "In this paper we assume..." They were an assumption. This demonstrates a live example of my major beef with the mainstream astrophysics community in action: the promotion of assumptions to facts. Hot spots were not detected, at all. If there are hot spots, they could not possibly be resolved by NICER, a small instrument attached to the ISS. This should be obvious to a prominent blogger of astronomy with a PhD in astrophysics.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They concluded that pulsar magnetic fields are <b>more complex</b> than typical, naive two-pole models.</blockquote>
The answer is always to add more complexity to the models.<br />
<br />
<h3>
What Is The Ultimate Fate Of The Loneliest Galaxy In The Universe? (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-is-the-ultimate-fate-of-the-loneliest-galaxy-in-the-universe-f3d5968620d3">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
Just as stars are mostly found clustered in galaxies, galaxies themselves are organized into larger structures. However, one galaxy is notable for having no neighbors within 100 million light years. Ethan provides an analysis of the mechanics of the galaxy by on the standard assumption that there are only two forces of significance that act on celestial bodies - gravity and dark energy.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To understand what this galaxy is going to do, first we have to understand what it’s like from the inside out. When the Universe was much younger than it is today, it was almost perfectly uniform, with regions that are only slightly overdense or underdense compared to the large-scale average. The regions with more matter than average will self-gravitate, drawing in matter from the surrounding volumes of space and eventually leading to the formation of stars, galaxies, and groups and clusters of galaxies on even larger scales.
<br />
<br />
Regions that are underdense, however, tend to give up their matter to the surrounding overdense regions, leading to vast cosmic voids between the strands of the cosmic web. Contrary to popular belief, however, even the regions of below-average density still tend to hang on to some amount of matter — both normal and dark — and with enough time, that matter will collapse to form structures, too.</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
That's the theory. Out of nearly uniform initial soup, matter condensed into the cosmic web, driven by gravity alone.<br />
<br />
He then offers a five-step understanding of extremely isolated galaxies.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. The regions that fail to give up all of their matter to the filamentary network that comprises our large-scale structure will gravitate towards their mutual center-of-mass, determined by the presence of both dark matter and normal matter.</blockquote>
</div>
This is a confusing way to phrase it. All matter in a particular region should move in the direction of the net gravitational force.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. The dark matter forms a large, diffuse halo of mass, while the normal matter sinks to the center, colliding with other normal matter particles and collapsing in the shortest dimension first.</blockquote>
The only force acting is gravity, and dark matter is said to exhibit the exact same gravitational mechanics as normal matter. There is no explanation given as to why dark matter would act differently and form a diffuse halo, rather than continuing towards the mutual center-of-mass as described in step 1. It is just magic that one must believe to be a proper academic these days. (The diffuse halo is required because dark matter was invented to explain the unpredicted rotational dynamics of galaxies.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. The normal matter “pancakes,” which is the scientific term for “goes splat,” and forms a disk that starts rotating.</blockquote>
More magic. Why does the 3D structure collapse into something that is nearly 2D? Why does nearly everything in the universe rotate? The gravitational collapse model does not explain why such polarity is ubiquitously observed throughout the cosmos, which is why he tries to gloss over the deep mystery with a single sentence.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. Inside the disk, stars form, leading to the familiar spiral structure we recognize.</blockquote>
Even more magic. Claiming that stars forming leads to spiral arms is a non sequitur that intends to gloss over another mystery that goes unexplained by the standard model.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
5. Dark matter gets dynamically heated, changing its density profile somewhat, while low-mass neutrinos eventually fall into the halo, adding to the mass.</blockquote>
If you can understand this you're doing better than me, but again it's vagueness hints that something is being covered up.<br />
<br />
Looking past all the mysterious mechanics that are brushed under the rug in this explanation, the overall gist is...what? That some matter didn't get formed into the larger filamentary structures and became an isolated galaxy. But that's just re-stating what we already knew.<br />
<br />
Not content with just an phenomenally terrible explanation of the past of the loneliest galaxy, he gives an explanation of the future as well, which is that it will get even lonelier as the universe expands.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For galaxies like our own, we’ll remain bound to our local group, including Andromeda, Triangulum, and about 60 additional galaxies, until they all merge together many billions of years in the future. Galaxies beyond our gravitationally bound group, like those in the Virgo cluster, will remain bound to their own parent groups, but will accelerate in their recession from our own.</blockquote>
While dark energy is said to be a fundamental aspect of all space, it somehow does not affect "gravitationally bound" systems - otherwise we'd detect its effect within our own solar system. He alleges that our local cluster is not gravitationally bound with the Virgo cluster, thus it is receding and that trend will only accelerate. How he came up with that example I do not know, but it seems to be ludicrous even by his standards, as it is directly contradicted by conventional astronomy. The local cluster is not being drifted away from Virgo by dark energy, but is moving towards it so swiftly that astronomers even have a name for it: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgocentric_flow">Virgocentric flow</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Virgocentric flow is the preferred movement of Local Group galaxies towards the Virgo cluster caused by its overwhelming gravity, which separates bound objects from the Hubble flow of cosmic expansion.</blockquote>
I believe he may be confused, because at the next level up - the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea_Supercluster">Laniakea supercluster</a> - astronomers believe that the system is not bound and will be pulled apart by dark energy.<br />
<br />
The article then goes on for a number of paragraphs giving the normal doom-filled prophesies of the inevitable heat death of the universe.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The eventual fate of the last galaxies in the Universe will be a skeletal dark matter/neutrino halo, far outlasting anything else we’ve ever observed.</blockquote>
<br />
<h3>
The Universe Really Is Fine-Tuned, And Our Existence Is The Proof (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-universe-really-is-fine-tuned-and-our-existence-is-the-proof-8be11c69c011">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
Modern astronomers are always surprised when their exotic formulas are shown to reveal a universe that is tuned the way it would be if it was not exotic at all.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Somehow, the Universe began with just the right mix of cosmic ingredients to make life possible. It sure doesn’t seem likely.</blockquote>
Of all the things he's said that I <b>do</b> agree with, that one must be at the top of the list.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When you take stock of what’s in the Universe on the largest scales, only one force matters: gravitation.</blockquote>
That's their theory. The primary premise of the Electric Universe people is that this assumption is false, and accounts for the bulk of the current crisis in cosmology. The observe that the electric force is much stronger than gravity and ignoring it at cosmic scales is probably a mistake.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
While the nuclear and electromagnetic forces that exist between particles are many, many orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force, they cannot compete on the largest cosmic scales. The Universe is electrically neutral, with one electron to cancel out the charge of every proton in the Universe, and the nuclear forces are extremely short-range, failing to extend beyond the scale of an atomic nucleus.</blockquote>
That the universe is electrically neutral is an assumption he is making because of the Big Bang Theory. That theory also predicts that equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created, which hasn't been observed and is one of the big mysteries they've left unexplained. Thus, there's no reason to assume that prediction of equal numbers of electrons and protons is valid. But even if they were, it wouldn't matter. The earth is supposedly neutral and yet we have powerful charge differentials that discharge through the atmosphere as lightning bolts, into space as sprites, and are lately being shown to be related to weather and seismic patterns. The solar system is said to be electrically neutral and yet the sun sends streams of charged particles to the earth that power the aurora - basically neon lights in the sky - and powering aurorae on Jupiter so powerful that they emit X-rays. The galaxy is said to be electrically neutral yet astronomers have detected polar jets of charged particles that have even been shown to connect intergalactically. At what scale, we have to wonder, does the claim of an electrically neutral universe actually hold?<br />
<br />
He then describes the universe as being in an unstable equilibrium, and that the probabilities required for it to randomly be so precisely tuned are impossible.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But if that’s the case, we’d hate to simply take that assumption at face value. In science, when faced with a coincidence that we cannot easily explain, the idea that we can blame it on the initial conditions of our physical system is akin to giving up on science. It’s far better, from a scientific point of view, to attempt to come up with a reason for why this coincidence might occur.</blockquote>
Exactly so. (Even though that's what they do with the Big Bang Theory, but no matter.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One option — the worst option, if you ask me — is to claim that there are a near-infinite number of possible outcomes, and a near-infinite number of possible Universes that contain those outcomes. Only in those Universes where our existence is possible can we exist, and therefore it’s not surprising that we exist in a Universe that has the properties that we observe.</blockquote>
There are some scientists who entertain the perfect tuning of our universe as proof that there are infinite multiple universes out there which aren't so perfectly tuned. To his credit, Ethan dismisses such logic, showing that even his capacity for suspension of doubt has limits. (But if the Multiverse ever wins a Nobel Prize he'll suddenly be its biggest advocate.)<br />
<br />
He then goes on to state that a good explanation is that cosmic inflation preceded cosmic expansion, thus the universe is flat. To me, that sounds like creating some hypothetical scenario to create the desired initial conditions to make the theory work, which he just said is bad.<br />
<br />
<h3>
What The 3 Biggest Physics Discoveries Of The Decade Mean For The Future Of Science (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-the-3-biggest-physics-discoveries-of-the-decade-mean-for-the-future-of-science-70e305994516">link</a>)</h3>
The three biggest physics discovers of the decade about to end are given as<br />
<ol>
<li>Discovery of the Higgs boson</li>
<li>Detection of gravitational waves</li>
<li>Observation of a black hole's event horizon</li>
</ol>
<div>
These are given in decreasing order of significance. I suspect the second two claims will ultimately be thrown out. They both suffer the same problem, which is a matter of tuning. The LIGO detector works by filtering a noisy signal and then comparing the results to a large catalog of theoretical signal patterns. Thus, the filtering is "tuned" whenever the output looks like one of the things on their list.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As similar thing happens for the infamous black hole picture. Using a vast amount of data and an algorithm of around a million lines of code, they came up with the picture they expected. Is anyone surprised? Now, I'm not a cosmology expert, but I did study artificial intelligence at the graduate-school level. Parameter tuning is something that must be done with care. When developing, say, a neural network to perform face recognition, developers must take to use separate sets of data for training and testing. It is fairly trivial to train an AI algorithm to respond as desired to a small training set - it is much harder to train it to respond to arbitrary data as desired. In the case of the black hole photo, there is no training set. There is no set at all, it's just one object. There is no way to independently verify the tuning, such as by resolving another object in the cosmos of known appearance. It's hard to know that they didn't just hard-tune the algorithm to the expected output, and would have seen the same image no matter what telescope data was provided.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Ask Ethan: Can Black Holes Ever Spit Anything Back Out? (<a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-can-black-holes-ever-spit-anything-back-out-c08f3c1e4416">link</a>)</h3>
</div>
<div>
Watching the astrophysicists try to explain why black holes are frequently the opposite of black is always amusing. I'll leave this one as an exercise to the reader, except for one aspect which is worth pointing out again in light of some of the other claims made during the week.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The same physics is at play — charged object in motion create magnetic fields, and those fields accelerate particles along one particular axis — which is what creates the relativistic jets we observe from a distance.</blockquote>
The prevailing theory of black holes is that there is gas rotating around them which heats up from friction (somehow) and becomes so energized that it ionizes into hot plasma. Then, that rotating plasma generates an enormous magnetic field, which tends to propel the infalling charged particles along the axis of rotation. Before Ethan said the universe is electrically neutral. In this case he says it isn't, but according to his explanation it should be. If neutral atoms dissociate into equal amounts of ions and electrons that rotate, their effects should cancel and no magnetic field will be generated. So, in effect, Ethan claims the universe is electrically neutral where it's not, but then makes an exception for it when needed but isn't even logical. He has invented a Dark Charge where needed and hopes no one notices. (Or, more likely, doesn't even realize it himself.)onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-38822381577275943802019-12-25T20:05:00.001-08:002019-12-25T20:05:06.392-08:00NASA News #2 An Evolving Mystery<div class="tr_bq">
It's a slow week for NASA news, but last week they ran <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/spitzer-studies-a-stellar-playground-with-a-long-history">an article</a> on the space-based Spitzer infrared telescope, due to be retired next month. The article covered new observations made of a region of the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The following quotes come from a section titled <i>An Evolving Mystery</i>.</div>
<blockquote>
Other clusters of stars seen below NGC 1333 in this image have posed a fascinating mystery for astronomers: They appear to contain stellar infants, adolescents and adults. Such a closely packed mixture of ages is extremely odd, according to Luisa Rebull, an astrophysicist at NASA's Infrared Science Archive at Caltech-IPAC who has studied NGC 1333 and some of the clusters below it. Although many stellar siblings may form together in tight clusters, stars are always moving, and as they grow older they tend to move farther and farther apart.
<br />
<br />
Finding such a closely packed mixture of apparent ages doesn't fit with current ideas about how stars evolve. "This region is telling astronomers that there's something we don't understand about star formation," said Rebull. The puzzle presented by this region is one thing that keeps astronomers coming back to it.</blockquote>
The stellar model is based on some assumptions about stars that may be false. There is no direct evidence to confirm the model either, nor is it clear how we could verify processes that act over billions of years. It is entirely possible that the stellar model is making many mis-classifications for what are new versus old stars. The important aspect of all this is that, as usual, new observations have contradicted consensus opinions.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Since IRAS's early observations, the region has come into clearer focus, a process that is common in astronomy, said Rebull. New instruments bring more sensitivity and new techniques, and the story becomes clearer with each new generation of observatories.</blockquote>
Technology allowing clearer imagery has <i>not</i> resulted in a clearer story. More observations mean more contradictions, more complexity, and more hand-wavy hypotheticals. And that is when the new evidence is considered at all. It is routine for missions launched at great expense to produce unpredicted results, then the scientists act surprised, and then nothing changes. Next they advocate for funding more missions, whereupon they will act surprised again and the cycle renews. The need for continued institutional optimism in the face of relentless failures has led to a form of doublespeak from the publicly funded academics. <i>The more our predictions fail, the clearer the story becomes. </i>It is assumed that more evidence leads to a clearer understanding, but that is not what is happening.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-80874261880897257052019-12-24T16:19:00.002-08:002019-12-25T09:30:26.176-08:00London Bus Attack Culprits Sentenced To Diversity LessonsIn June we covered the London bus attack of a lesbian couple by a group of unidentified teenagers. From <a href="https://calmgullemergentsea.blogspot.com/2019/06/violence-epidemic-among-british-men.html">Lesbians Attacked by "British Men,"</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A lesbian couple were hospitalised with facial injuries and left covered in blood after being attacked by a group of men after they kissed on a night bus in north London.
<br />
<br />
...
<br />
<br />
Ms Geymonat said she tried to calm the situation down by making jokes, while Chris pretended to be ill. She then describes how the attack escalated, with the gang of men punching them both in the face until they were covered in blood.</blockquote>
Sentencing has now been completed, with one boy receiving four months in custody for the battery, and the other two given referral orders, meaning they get <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-50892347">diversity lessons</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The youth was given an eight-month youth referral order, extended from six due to the homophobic nature of the attack.</blockquote>
In other words, he would have received a more lenient sentence if he'd only had the decency to beat up a straight couple instead. In more primitive societies, punishments for crimes depended on the relative social castes of the victim and perpetrator. The same is true in England and most western countries. Because homosexuals are revered, assaulting them comes with harsher penalties. (Although in this case the penalty is still a wrist slap because the assailants are also of a preferred caste.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
District Judge Nicholas Rimmer said: "You need the close supervision of the youth offending service to think carefully about your behaviour. "This will include diversity sessions which will make you think about hate crime, the protected characteristics and minority groups."</blockquote>
That or he will go on a <a href="https://calmgullemergentsea.blogspot.com/2019/12/muslims-kill-liberals-pt-8.html">stabbing rampage</a> at the rehabilitation facility.<br />
<br />
The article includes an interview of the two victims.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxGcT1eQEksltiDfRwCRGOitV3tdFIu5tGEIIMNMrmlIB04Kt_3YDrGqQoVKUUHdjcMngGlz1UoVoU8vCGwXgDCShQqnM296ifk2trhDaRxxt2caGIQHI3BAKBIgmiMRBhXRoWTscvEZU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-12-24+at+4.50.52+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="1218" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxGcT1eQEksltiDfRwCRGOitV3tdFIu5tGEIIMNMrmlIB04Kt_3YDrGqQoVKUUHdjcMngGlz1UoVoU8vCGwXgDCShQqnM296ifk2trhDaRxxt2caGIQHI3BAKBIgmiMRBhXRoWTscvEZU/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-12-24+at+4.50.52+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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They look awful. Six months later and they're still angry and emotional about their treatment. The reason for the trauma was the denial of expectations. They thought they were engaged in a lifestyle that would earn them praise and special treatment from society. They did not expect to be roughed up by foreigners on public transport, nor for the culprits to go nearly unpunished. The most telling aspect is the body posture of the two women: each leaned away from the other. One of them states that she is not afraid to be "visibly queer" - while wearing a fearful expression - and that the incident is empowering them to only increase their public displays of affection. Still, I would not be surprised to learn in the future that one or both of the women abandon the LGBT lifestyle altogether. Such pairings are not found in nature and require a society to grant them special considerations. Britain wants to be the most Globohomo self it can be, yet also doesn't want to have to answer the question of whether Islam is right about women. Words are cheap and we are saturated by endless platitudes, but the reality is plainly worn by these two.onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-80155769664740873902019-12-23T10:56:00.000-08:002019-12-23T22:12:31.496-08:00Buttigieg: Reparations For InvasionButtigieg has a natural (or perhaps unnatural) advantage as a homosexual backwaters mayor over his competition - predominately married Washington careerists with white children. He enjoys an automatic status of piety from an establishment orthodoxy that treats homosexuality as a high virtue to be celebrated, and gets to claim a spot well up the victim hierarchy of the aggrieved left. His major advantage is the strategy potential that this opens up for him - if he is wise enough to exercise those options. For one, it gives him some space from having to constantly pander to victim groups. Just being a small-town gay "Christian" mayor from Mike Pence's home state is nearly enough. He can just drag his gay husband onto stage and all but state, "I too have been oppressed by our common enemy, those bigots."<br />
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He has recently decided to break from his well-crafted character to call for reparations for blacks and for families separated at the southern border after being detained trying to enter the country illegally. The Buttigieg handicap is that blacks and Latinos aren't as excited with LGBT as the white yuppies. It was not only personally embarrassing to be polling at 0% with blacks in South Carolina, but certainly alarming to his strategists. The response has been to go extra-large on white-to-brown welfare promises. Basically, he is offering the standard Democrat minority vote-buying scheme, but with backpay. It's normal for Democrats to engage in these Praetorian bidding wars, but for Buttigieg it works against his natural advantages. The sane candidate can't just start promising payouts to invaders because his polling numbers are off. His disadvantage with minorities is baked in to his character, so he's not going to win them over by engaging in the same pandering as the other candidates. They're all engaging in similar rhetoric, so he's trying to play a game he's rigged to lose. He's taken the status quo approach, but he's not the status quo candidate.<br />
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Instead of playing insider softball, he should take a queue from Trump and nuke his opponents while playing to his own advantages. I believe that Mayor Pete could derail both Biden and Warren while earning a ton of free publicity, if he'd only wipe off that dopey grin for a bit and play some hardball.<br />
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Right now is the perfect time to go after Biden for his Ukraine corruption. With impeachment voted on by the House, but Pelosi awkwardly hesitating to deliver the articles to the Senate, this is an excellent time for him to remark to the media that Biden needs to be held accountable too. The media certainly would like a distraction away from the impeachment hiccups. The only reason no one is calling out Biden now is that they're afraid of angering establishment Democrats. They're afraid of the likes of Nancy Pelosi. That's why he should simultaneously criticize her for not getting the articles of impeachment delivered. Put her on her heels, create a media storm about Biden, and show the pundit class that this outsider is to be taken seriously.<br />
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After that clears, go relentlessly after Elizabeth Warren for her racial appropriation. That's going to push the needle on black support more than the standard incremental pledges for welfare, which are monotonous. He could all but make Warren out as a plantation owner, enriching herself on the backs of minorities, stealing their entitlements, etc. If he plays his cards right, he can torch his opponents and win the nomination without having to lunge back to center after the nomination, and play the role of the reasonable guy versus wildcard Trump. In fact, any of the other candidates could do so. It probably plays best for Buttigieg as an outsider, but still the fruit is so low-hanging that all who resist it are fake candidates. Buttigieg may be playing for a Cabinet or VP slot, but that means he isn't really running for president. Bernie Sanders obviously isn't looking for VP because of his age. He only runs for the adulation he gets on the campaign trail. Tulsi Gabbard has already openly mocked Hillary Clinton... why doesn't she go after Biden or Warren? Are any of these Democrats playing to win?onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-3821537683238359052019-12-20T19:00:00.004-08:002019-12-20T19:00:49.842-08:00Starliner Misses Space StationToday was the debut launch of Starliner, a NASA-funded Boeing project to ferry astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station for the first time in nearly a decade. The last post from this blog stated,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I also note that Boeing is having trouble developing safe passenger airliners after embracing diversity as a core principle. I'd put their odds at less than 50%, and predict there will be problems either way.</blockquote>
Previously this blog has stated that the US is out of the manned space business for good. We will not be sending men to Mars, or the moon, or even out of low-Earth orbit. For the less ambitious goal of low-orbit launches, however, it is possible they will succeed, but there is reason to be much more pessimistic than the conventional sentiment. Most people can't fathom why an American venture to send astronauts to low-earth orbit would be anything by an easily obtained success.<br />
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We expect the reporting on the event to come through rose-tinted glasses. If the mission is a success, we will of course hear raving review. If the mission is a complete disaster, then they will have no choice but to admit so. The uncertainty is whether we'll hear honest reports about failures that wouldn't otherwise by apparent to the public.<br />
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<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-statement-on-boeing-orbital-flight-test">NASA reports</a> on the launch,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Early this morning, NASA and Boeing successfully launched Starliner on the first human-rated United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida.</blockquote>
Ah, a success then! Perhaps I was overly pessimistic. Let's read the next paragraph of that report.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The plan was for Starliner to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station and return home safely to Earth. While a lot of things went right, the uncrewed spacecraft did not reach the planned orbit and will not dock to the International Space Station.</blockquote>
Well, that doesn't sound like a success. The rose-tinted reporting must be in effect. If the measure of success is that the rocket didn't explode on the launch pad, or fail to reach orbit, then it was a success. Does the success mean that the launch would not have killed human passengers?<br />
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From <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/20/boeings-starliner-flies-into-wrong-orbit-jeopardizing-trip-to-the-international-space-station.html">CNBC coverage</a>, chosen only because it was the top hit in a news search,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Boeing said it has been able to at least partially correct Starliner’s trajectory in space, getting the vehicle to stable orbit around the Earth while engineers assess the options remaining for the mission. If astronauts had been on board, both NASA and Boeing believe they would be safe.</blockquote>
That's not very re-assuring. <i>Believe</i> they would be safe? Believe is frequently used as a cop-out word, such as when used by politicians. It sounds like there is a chance than astronauts would not have survived the launch. It also sounds like the controllers struggled to get the craft into orbit at all, rather than merely missing the desired orbit. A failed orbital injection would not necessarily be disastrous, but ballistic re-entry means means losing control of the splash-down zone.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“It appears as though the mission elapse timing system had an error in it,” Bridenstine said.
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The mission elapse timing system is essentially Starliner’s internal clock. It is crucial to telling the spacecraft’s computers when and how to fire its rocket thrusters to reach the correct orbit.
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“That anomaly resulted in the vehicle believing that the time was different than it actually was,” Bridenstine said. “Because that timing was a little bit off, what ended up happening is the spacecraft tried to maintain a very precise control that it normally wouldn’t have tried to maintain and it burned a lot of [propellant] in that part of the flight.”</blockquote>
This is actually a hint that they're being honest. Whatever is the highest criticality rating that Boeing assigns to software components, it surely applies to the system clock. This is a system that they would have developed to the highest level of confidence. It's not the kind of failure they'd like to admit to, if they could at all help it. It's a bit like the Martian lander than become a crater because of failed unit conversions between metric and standard.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Boeing’s human flight controllers tried to communicate with Starliner during the flight to correct the error. But the spacecraft was in a communication dead zone, a gap between two communication satellites.
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“We couldn’t get the command signal to the spacecraft that it needed to do the orbital insertion burn soon enough,” Bridenstine said.
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With no astronauts on board to take over manual control of the spacecraft, Bridenstine noted that part of the issue comes down to automation.</blockquote>
It is an understandable sequence of events. Normally, disasters don't arise from a single failure, but a series of them.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This represents a blow for NASA as well, likely further delaying the agency’s return to being able to fly its astronauts to the space station. Delays have plagued the commercial crew program, as NASA intended the first launches to happen as early as 2017.</blockquote>
The program was announced in 2010, with a goal of operation by 2015. The five-year plan was just two year's shy of the time between Kennedy's announcement of a moon-landing deadline and the (supposed) completion of that mission. It has now been nine years to get to a failed unmanned space docking - a feat the Russians achieved in 1967.<br />
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With all that said, there's no reason to expect any test mission to be successful. If failures weren't expected, there'd be no need for test launches. Also, Space-X succeeded in a similar test earlier this year, so perhaps one of the programs will succeed. Still, the failure of the maiden voyage to due to a failure of critical software falls in line with our expectations of the Boeing manned-flight program.<br />
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onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7666833779609266360.post-17117510878319909872019-12-18T20:11:00.001-08:002019-12-18T20:11:27.435-08:00NASA News #1<div class="tr_bq">
In the spirit of the <i>Contrabang! </i>series, let's take a look at headlines from NASA's own website in the past week. This won't become another weekly series...for now at least. However, <i>Contrabang!</i> will not likely continue indefinitely. That series is a good opportunity to critique a scientific narrative that is being promoted to the public, but Ethan is not himself a scientific authority; he merely finds whatever the scientific consensus happens to be and then promotes that with great pomp. At some point it becomes repetitious. On the other hand, NASA appears to be the single-largest promoter of these lies as a scientific authority that is held in high esteem by most of the public. Thus, we will start attempting to be more mature about these things, and focus on the players rather than the cheerleaders.</div>
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<h3>
NASA’s NICER Delivers Best-ever Pulsar Measurements, 1st Surface Map (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-nicer-delivers-best-ever-pulsar-measurements-1st-surface-map">link</a>)</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Astrophysicists are redrawing the textbook image of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Using NICER data, scientists have obtained the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar’s size and its mass, as well as the first-ever map of hot spots on its surface. </blockquote>
This is misleading enough to call it a lie. They do not have any of the implied measurements; they only have models. While the NASA homepage article is misleading, the <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_NICER_Constraints_on_the_Dense_Matter_Equation_of_State">journal summary</a> they link to uses the correct language.<br />
<blockquote>
Notably, the inferences drawn from Bayesian modeling of the PSR J0030 NICER pulse-profile data set provide:<br />
<ul>
<li>the first precise (±10%, 1 sigma) mass and radius measurements for the same star;</li>
<li>the first mass measurement for an isolated (i.e., non-binary) NS; and</li>
<li>the first map—fully accounting for relativistic light deflection—of an NS’s surface “hot spots,” providing the locations, shapes, sizes, and temperatures of heated regions and serving as a guidepost to the star’s magnetic field configuration.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
The so-called measurements are merely the results of Bayesian model, which is a graph of conditional probabilities. A conditional probability is the statement of the probability of X given that we know Y. What is the probability that they cancel school tomorrow? Low. What is the probability that they cancel school tomorrow given that we know it just snowed a foot? High. The probability of the thing we don't know is dependent on the facts we do know. In the case of pulsars, most of what is "known" is a false (and ludicrous) theory of dead rotating stars composed of theoretical neutronium. So the description of the results should read more like this: <i>given the observed timings and spectral signature of the observed star - and that our pulsar models are not complete horse manure - then these are the most probable measurements of the star according to our calculations</i>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), lies in an isolated region of space 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree “hot spots” on the pulsar’s surface are much stranger than generally thought.
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“From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars,” said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Pulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now.”
</blockquote>
We see the old familiar pattern emerging. Scientists make new observations and state that they are strange, impossible, revolutionizing, etc. What happens next?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly how pulsars work. In the simplest model, a pulsar has a powerful magnetic field shaped much like a household bar magnet. The field is so strong it rips particles from the pulsar’s surface and accelerates them. Some particles follow the magnetic field and strike the opposite side, heating the surface and creating hot spots at the magnetic poles. The whole pulsar glows faintly in X-rays, but the hot spots are brighter. As the object spins, these spots sweep in and out of view like the beams of a lighthouse, producing extremely regular variations in the object’s X-ray brightness. But the new NICER studies of J0030 show pulsars <b>aren’t so simple.</b></blockquote>
That's right, the response to unexpected observations is always to hold on to all the old assumptions and start adding complexity to the models.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Using NICER observations from July 2017 to December 2018, two groups of scientists mapped J0030’s hot spots using independent methods and converged on similar results for its mass and size. A team led by Thomas Riley, a doctoral student in computational astrophysics, and his supervisor Anna Watts, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, determined the pulsar is around 1.3 times the Sun’s mass and 15.8 miles (25.4 kilometers) across. Cole Miller, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland (UMD) who led the second team, found J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass and slightly larger, about 16.2 miles (26 kilometers) wide.</blockquote>
The methods are not really independent, because they are both dependent on the same flawed model of neutron stars. If one of the groups had declared beforehand that the academic embrace of neutron stars is laughably absurd, they'd have been excluded and another group chosen. Thus, no independence.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“NICER’s unparalleled X-ray measurements allowed us to make the most precise and reliable calculations of a pulsar’s size to date, with an uncertainty of less than 10%,” Miller said.</blockquote>
The uncertainty of the size is less than 10% given that they are 100% certain in their model for pulsars.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“It’s remarkable, and also very reassuring, that the two teams achieved such similar sizes, masses and hot spot patterns for J0030 using different modeling approaches,” said Zaven Arzoumanian.</blockquote>
The same data, the same model for the stars, only different implementations of the Bayesian networks. It would only be amusing if they <i>hadn't</i> gotten similar results. But, <i>garbage in, garbage out</i> is the gold standard in the world of peer-review supremacy, just so long as your garbage looks consistent with theirs.<br />
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<h3>
NASA's Juno Navigators Enable Jupiter Cyclone Discovery (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-juno-navigators-enable-jupiter-cyclone-discovery">link</a>)</h3>
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Juno makes a "fundamental discovery" at Jupiter's south polar region. Where there were five storms swirling around the pole in a pentagonal pattern, a sixth emerging storm has been photographed, with the new pattern hexagonal.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"These cyclones are new weather phenomena that have not been seen or predicted before," said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist from the University of California, Berkeley. "Nature is revealing new physics regarding fluid motions and how giant planet atmospheres work. We are beginning to grasp it through observations and computer simulations. Future Juno flybys will help us further refine our understanding by revealing how the cyclones evolve over time."</blockquote>
There is, of course, nothing in the standard models of planetary mechanics to explain pentagon and hexagon shaped storm formations at the poles of gas giants, and I doubt they'll be able to add any amount of complexity to their models to make it happen.<br />
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<h3>
X Marks the Spot: NASA Selects Site for Asteroid Sample Collection (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/x-marks-the-spot-nasa-selects-site-for-asteroid-sample-collection/">link</a>)</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
After a year scoping out asteroid Bennu’s boulder-scattered surface, the team leading NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission has officially selected a sample collection site.</blockquote>
NASA has sent a probe to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples to return the Earth. The USA has never executed a soil return mission. Allegedly the Apollo missions returned nearly half a ton of moon rocks, but those samples remain classified and locked away. The Russians also claimed to have returned soil from the moon in the 1970. Perhaps they did, but I retain skepticism, because the next attempt was not made until 2010 when the Japanese Hyabusa probe to a near-Earth asteroid was mostly a failure when only a minuscule amount of dust was returned. A second Hyabusa mission is underway and is expected to return samples a year from now. If it succeeds, then it may actually be the world's first successful mission to return a soil sample from another celestial body.<br />
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<h3>
Boeing and NASA Approach Milestone Orbital Flight Test (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/boeing-and-nasa-approach-milestone-orbital-flight-test">link</a>)</h3>
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On Friday, NASA is planning on launching an unmanned mission of their new Boeing-built spacecraft intended to ultimately ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and end the embarrassment of having to pay Russia for rides. Previously, this blog said America was out of the manned-space business for good (or at least as long as the Woke Era prevails). I also note that Boeing is having trouble developing safe passenger airliners after embracing diversity as a core principle. I'd put their odds at less than 50%, and predict there will be problems either way.</div>
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<br /></div>
<h3>
NASA’s SDO Sees New Kind of Magnetic Explosion on Sun (<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-sdo-sees-new-kind-of-magnetic-explosion-on-sun">link</a>)</h3>
<div>
The mainstream scientific world is ever so slowly opening up to the electric reality of the universe. The rule is that they must refer to the observations as magnetic rather than electric. So here, they have invented the term "magnetic explosion" to explain electric arcing seen on the sun's surface. Magnetic fields are okay; electric fields are still verboten. In fact, it is preferable to make up magnetic phenomena rather than speak in electric terms. Thus, magnetic field lines - which are only an abstraction - are said to "recombine." The lines don't really exist - they were created by humans to help visualize the direction and strength of magnetic fields. Still, the move away from a strictly gravity dominated universe to one where magnetism play a major role is a good shift, since the magnetic universe is just a back door to the electric universe.</div>
onezenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08215236433068687322noreply@blogger.com0