Equality is Aquality

With 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.

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 must 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.

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 four hundred restaurants closing in San Francisco. Perhaps that isn't a lot in such a populous city, but the witness accounts are that it's part of an observable trend.

“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.”

Witness testimonies also indicate that properties are remaining vacant longer. Restaurant owners blame the business environment of the city for the hard times.

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.

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."

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.

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 Voat comment is enlightening.

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.

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.

Futurism Is History

In Zman's post The Future Of Futurism, 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.

Z takes a slightly different approach.

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.

Well, that's a little out there. And, it's useless analysis, since it could be used to explain anything. Why does anything happen? Because the mystical beings who run our simulation wanted it that way. 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 God wills it.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 less 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.

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.

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.

1. Artificial intelligence is real intelligence

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.

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.

2. Genes are the code of life

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.

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.

3. Humans landed on the moon in 1969

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.

Starliner Clock Off By Eleven Hours

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 SpaceNews.

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.

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.

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 $9-an-hour programmers. 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

While not many outlets have picked this up, Motley Fool chimed in from a business perspective.

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.

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.

Hindsight Is 2019

This 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.

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.

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 what but the who that they were interested in.

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 not been corrupted.

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.

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!

In 2015, the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked to the public. They revealed numerous aspects of corruption and criminality, most notably

1. 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
2. a smoking-gun document of pay-for-play bribery within the Obama administration
3. that Clinton's campaign staff are literally Satanists

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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?

Contrabang #33 Dark Charge

Output for this blog suffered as I got lazy over the holidays, but we're back with a fairly long 2-week version of Contrabang! and posts should return to the normal pace.

This Is How Eta Carinae Survived A Near-Supernova Eruption (link)

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.

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.

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.

1. The power increased gradually over years
2. The event has occurred at least three times since the 19th century, with many small-scale variations within the larger cycle
3. The core star has not been destroyed

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.

In 2005, observations revealed that Eta Carinae isn’t a single star, but a binary system in a ~5.5 year mutual orbit.

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.

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.

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 least bad hypothesis and promoting that as scientific knowledge.

It’s possible that a specific cataclysm triggered this outburst: the devouring of a third star.

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.

NASA’s NICER Mission Reveals An Unexpected Neutron Star Surprise (link)

We discussed the NICER results in the very first installment of the NASA News segment. Now Ethan has something to say about it, although you already know what his position is.

The low-energy X-ray observatory measures timing signals down to 300 nanoseconds and at unprecedented sensitivities.

True.

NICER enables measurements of neutron stars’ sizes, masses, cooling times, stabilities, and internal structures.

False. Measurements 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.

For one pulsar in particular, J0030+0451, they determined its mass (1.35 Suns) and diameter (25.7 km) explicitly.

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.

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.

They detected “hot spots” on the surface and constructed the first-ever neutron star map.

Another lie. From the original paper.

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.

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.

They concluded that pulsar magnetic fields are more complex than typical, naive two-pole models.

The answer is always to add more complexity to the models.

 What Is The Ultimate Fate Of The Loneliest Galaxy In The Universe? (link)

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.

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.

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.

That's the theory. Out of nearly uniform initial soup, matter condensed into the cosmic web, driven by gravity alone.

He then offers a five-step understanding of extremely isolated galaxies.

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.

This is a confusing way to phrase it. All matter in a particular region should move in the direction of the net gravitational force.

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.

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.)

3. The normal matter “pancakes,” which is the scientific term for “goes splat,” and forms a disk that starts rotating.

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.

4. Inside the disk, stars form, leading to the familiar spiral structure we recognize.

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.

5. Dark matter gets dynamically heated, changing its density profile somewhat, while low-mass neutrinos eventually fall into the halo, adding to the mass.

If you can understand this you're doing better than me, but again it's vagueness hints that something is being covered up.

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.

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.

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.

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: Virgocentric flow.

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.

I believe he may be confused, because at the next level up - the Laniakea supercluster - astronomers believe that the system is not bound and will be pulled apart by dark energy.

The article then goes on for a number of paragraphs giving the normal doom-filled prophesies of the inevitable heat death of the universe.

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.

The Universe Really Is Fine-Tuned, And Our Existence Is The Proof (link)

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.

Somehow, the Universe began with just the right mix of cosmic ingredients to make life possible. It sure doesn’t seem likely.

Of all the things he's said that I do agree with, that one must be at the top of the list.

When you take stock of what’s in the Universe on the largest scales, only one force matters: gravitation.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Exactly so. (Even though that's what they do with the Big Bang Theory, but no matter.)

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.

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.)

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.

What The 3 Biggest Physics Discoveries Of The Decade Mean For The Future Of Science (link)

The three biggest physics discovers of the decade about to end are given as

1. Discovery of the Higgs boson
2. Detection of gravitational waves
3. Observation of a black hole's event horizon

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.

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.

Ask Ethan: Can Black Holes Ever Spit Anything Back Out? (link)

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.

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.

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.)

NASA News #2 An Evolving Mystery

It's a slow week for NASA news, but last week they ran an article 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 An Evolving Mystery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technology allowing clearer imagery has not 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. The more our predictions fail, the clearer the story becomes. It is assumed that more evidence leads to a clearer understanding, but that is not what is happening.

London Bus Attack Culprits Sentenced To Diversity Lessons

In June we covered the London bus attack of a lesbian couple by a group of unidentified teenagers. From Lesbians Attacked by "British Men,"

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.

...

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.

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 diversity lessons.

The youth was given an eight-month youth referral order, extended from six due to the homophobic nature of the attack.

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.)

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."

That or he will go on a stabbing rampage at the rehabilitation facility.

The article includes an interview of the two victims.

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.