Space News November 2020

 Just for fun:  Alien art installation in Utah.  About a year ago someone placed a polished monolith in a remote desert location.  Fun if it really were aliens.

There's possible evidence of an active volcano on  the Tharsis volanic plateau of Mars.  A smudge showed up on a Mars photo October 22nd that wasn't there a few days earlier.  Spacenews.com October 25th

From Japan comes a detailed study of the last magnetic pole reversal of Earth about the time our species started moving out of Africa.  Sea sediments were studied in unprecedented detail.  A major finding is the change may have taken twenty thousand years with a long period of instability leading up. 

Planetary atmospheric surprises:  Recent years have brought photographic records of new phenomena:  Sprites and ELVES, gravity waves in clouds, STEVE and now reported this month, "little green cannonballs" on the edge of STEVE.

A meteor, 2020 VT4  the size of a small house,  scooted by Earth November 13th and was discovered the next day.  5-11 meter diameter, not big enough to alarm people but you wouldn't want it landing in your neighbourhood.  It passed below the space station orbit.

Sodium tail on Mercury:  A nice photo was published of the sodium trail, like the tail of a comet, that tags along with Mercury on the away side. It's a composite with filters, made dramatic by including trees peripheral to the view.

There's been progress looking for evidence of past supernovas that impacted earth.  A 3% spike in Carbon-14 is considered a strong signature.  Brakenridge tried to match four known events of the last  40,000 years with the patched together record of tree growth rings.  There was a correlation but the time signatures were too fuzzy to brag about.

NASA is putting together plans for a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.  It would be a wire mesh shape following the contour of an existing dish-like crater.   Great idea, anticipated years ago by Heinlein and made more appealing as the Arecibo observatory is being shut down without a funding plan to safely rebuild the suspension cables.   NASA has asked for proposals to set up a nuclear power plant on the moon and on Mars with the moon one ready to launch in 2026. .  Of course!    And China launched a mission this week to bring back a couple kg of moon samples.  What struck me is the plan to dig down up to six feet.

Buried "cave" in Antarctica:  This story is probably an artifact of the pixels but the possibility of a large unexplained opening to an underground void exists.  The NY Post includes a chatty 11 minute video clip that has some striking google earth imagery.

Hubble has a photo of one galaxy falling like a waterfall into the middle of a larger one.

Crazy but likely true:  

An asteroid trailing Mars appears to be a chunk blasted from our own moon.

The group of "Trojan" asteroids that trail along after Mars orbit has one rock whose spectral image doesn't belong.  "The spectrum of this particular asteroid seems to be almost a dead-ringer for parts of the Moon where there is exposed bedrock such as crater interiors and mountains," explains AOP astrochemist Galin Borisov.

First ever rogue planet found drifting through our galaxy without a home star.  The moment you think of it, it's obvious there will be many more to find.  This one was found by gravitational micro-lensing, tiny blips in the light of some stars it passed in front of.  Estimated size is close to that of mother Earth.

Tunguska explosion update:  Evidence is stronger that it was a near miss by a meteor twice the length of a football field

October report in Forbes:  No extra-terrestrial debris has ever been found from the 1908 event that flattened trees over an immense area.  It was seen over a distance of 700 km which rules out an ice object that would have vaporized.  The Siberian Federal University did computer simulations that ruled out ice and estimated the object's size.  There were a series of air bursts that left high atmospheric dust explaining glowing clouds reported later in Europe.

Once again, the very wealthy hold more than 80% of the rest of America combined.

 See chart but think about it too.

There's no data for "the common man" before the seventies but the wealthy data points cover a century.
Before the stock market crash and well into the 1930's, the very wealthy held a similar immense share of all of America's wealth.
That the immensely wealthy have again as big a share of the pie as they did 90 years ago may not indicate dysfunction.  Missing from the chart is a report on how much the pie has grown since then for the benefit of all.
When you add up the top tenth of a percent, the top one percent (presumably excluding the top tenth of a percent)  and the eighty percent, there's a lot of wealth held by the other 19%.
And remember that much of what we call "poor" means "young" as new entrants to the workforce are at the bottom rungs of their career and earning power.

Unemployed and Homeless: A Love Note

How can I be unemployed and homeless?  Blame it on Helen.

My best use is to appreciate one or two people well, and when she died this spring of cancer, I became unemployed.    

"What does home mean to me?" a friend asked.   
When Helen stirs awake and turns towards me, she tucks her head under my chin, casts a leg over and drift back to sleep in my arms.  That's home and since she gave up the ghost, I've been homeless too"
.

Where exactly are people getting sick? Here's data from Kentucky and it's NOT restaurants.

 Data reposted by Instapundit from Knox County TN show 70%
of all infections, whether symptomatic or not, are accounted for by Nursing Homes, Assisted Living  and interactions in the community at large...NOT restaurants, bars and grocery stores and workplaces.   This is a small sample geographically but comprehensive..

Sick and Symptomatic are not the same.

From the WUWT survey titled "Where are all the sick people", come a reminder that every winter we knew people who were sick with the usual Type A and B flus but most of us know no-one or almost no-one who's had Covid-19.  That's egregious because the Covid-19 numbers are based not on symptoms but on (somewhat erratic) test reports whereas the flu numbers are based on sniffles and coughs and complaints we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears.  As noted, the numbers of symptomatic flu cases is 35 to 45 million every year

Here in the same article is a survey of several thousand people.  The questions were "Do you know anyone currently sick with Covid-19" and "Do you know anyone personally who had to stay home because of Covid-19 in the last nine months?"

Most people don't have anyone in their circle who is sick or who was sick and most of the exceptions know 1 to 5 at most.  Is this enough to shut down productive society, to stop relationships, to isolate neighbours, to bankrupt restaurants and hotels and brand people with masks, enmeshing them in curfews even?

When I read reports about "cases" rather than sick people in the most recent stories, I call baloney.
If, however, you want to protect the elderly with other morbidities, let's do it to our utmost.

People with dementia become collateral damage of pandemic proclamations.

 From the Washington Post.

A lot of elderly people died without a hug, collateral damage of Covid management.
I expect good data to have balance, on  the one hand this, on the other hand that.  The other hand has been silent about the costs of isolation and the cancellation of normal life.

You want your bank PIN secure. Why not your vote?

 

Lockdown plays favorites and money talks

 From suggestion at Instapundit.  Rules are for little people. Edit "rich" menu to include "credentialed with a side of smug"

Green and yellow parrot teams play basketball. Change my mind!

Genetically engineered corn has eliminated an insecticide.

 So, are you okay with less insect poison and not okay with more corn with edited DNA? Check out the chart. BT corn (resistant by design to a specific bacteria) is the main maize grown now and all that insect poison has disappeared. 

 Item "B" in the picture from Nature compares BT and non-BT resistant corn.

The chart on insecticide use is from Watts Up With That.
The insecticide disappears from the data in 2010.

Canadians saving stimulus money: Wealth redistributed from government to individuals!

 Canadians put aside record amounts of cash this year, thanks to government.  Centralized money was redistributed and not immediately wasted, an astonishing turn of events.   Comment from the National Post source:  "Government transfers were actually larger than the amount of money lost in the labour market"  and  "it’s not unthinkable that some of this money went to people that didn’t need it" and "High savings rates are in turn expected to put a damper on Canada’s economic recovery".  Businesses as well as individuals have set aside some extra cash. Set asides may be higher as cash accounts but not investment accounts were tallied.

Make room for ignorance: Unknown unknowns.

 "A library should include as much of what you do not know as your means allow". Quoted here.
This is in the same spirit as the Feynman quote heading this blog:  "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.".    At the link is another pointed quotation:  

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.”  — Lincoln Steffens

To add one more layer to this ham sandwich before you bite down, remember Donald Rumsfeld's apothegm:  

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones".

Count your blessings

 We live with abundance.  Think of this tale from a Mennonite village in the Crimea in the early 1900's.  The women kept their laying hens in a shared shelterand every night put a finger up their hens to agree on who got an egg next day and who did not.  A bit of yarn was tied to the leg of each hen in lay. Told me by a woman whose mother had hens there.

World catching fire with blind, attractive life behind it.
A glimpse of this interregnum in the USA, and here too.

As a hexagram we'd read war and portent of war, and a beauty, if we can keep it.

 

 

Dresden WW2 after bombing

The worst hit part of Dresden after the firestorm started by bombing in WW2.  Think of the crisped corpses in thousands, formerly neighbours.

 

Land values across the US

 Nationwide US data for land assessment recently came available.  Think of it as cost per acre or per lot.   Here' s  a map. This was presented in Watts Up With That  as a metric for comparing costs of conservation plans.  It also overlaps the distribution of democrat (red) and republican (green) voters. The author was surprised that his data was more predictive of land transaction costs than the aggregate of local assessor numbers.

 

Masculinity in the home is good for kids

 

Why?

 

“Why” is downstream from “Is”.
And I conclude that meaning is not intrinsic to life.
It is extrinsic, we add it.

What brings the thought?
How I loved my sweetheart, now gone.
She stopped.
My life is richer for loving her now
though she died.

Bogus reporting about Fox Corp "tumbling" 6%. See stock chart.

 Yes, Fox News is bleeding viewers but a story about Fox Corp tumbling 6% right after the election is misleading, kind of bogus.   It was much higher last winter before the Covid collapse.  The pre-election and post-election numbers hardly differ.

Who owns Dominion Voting Systems? DUCKDUCKGO vs GOOGLE

 This appalling contrast isn't about nudging, it's about outright deception and misdirection.  I typed "Who owns Dominion Voting Machines" into Google and DuckDuckGo and was shocked.  DuckDuckGo takes a stab at answering the question and Google doesn't even bother with the question but launches straight into "Nothing to see here!" stories about fraud.  Google bizarrely suggests that "Wo owns" might be a better search than "Who owns".                    (No one seems to have a fair answer at the moment.  Soros as owner appears to be a head fake, Feinstein's husband as a major owner may not be,  Pelosi family involvement may be small and indirect.)

Two Americas, stupefyingly different.

I'm with the deplorables.   Economy is tops, climate change isn't, racism is way down the list and Covid politicans are worse than the infection.   The differences noted below are statistically like night and day. Quoted from Spiked:

"Indeed, the split of Biden and Trump voters on issues is striking, too. Of the voters who think the economy and jobs is the most important issue, the vast majority are Trump supporters: 81 per cent compared with just 16 per cent of Biden supporters. Of the voters who think racism is the most important issue, 78 per cent were Biden supporters and just 19 per cent were Trump supporters. And of the voters who think climate change is the most important issue, 86 per cent were Biden supporters and just 11 per cent were Trump supporters. On Covid, 83 per cent of Biden supporters said it is ‘not under control at all’, while just 15 per cent of Trump voters said the same thing."

"New York, totally Democratic, had no problem counting its votes. Texas, totally Republican, had no problem counting its votes." Vodkapundit

From Vodkapundit:

"New York, totally Democratic, had no problem counting its votes.Texas, totally Republican, had no problem counting its votes. It was the same story in every deep Red or Deep Blue state, regardless of size.

The only states that couldn’t seem to count their ballots on time, the only states where the allegedly dead rise to vote, the only states where turnout in places apparently exceeded the number of registered voters, the only states reported by whistleblowers for ignoring their own laws on accepting mail-in ballots, the only states that keep finding substantial numbers of new ballots, the only states with reports of substantial numbers of destroyed or lost ballots, the only states where we see reports of thousands upon thousands of ballots that are marked only for Joe Biden and no other candidates in any other race…  …all of these things are happening only in states where the outcome was ever in doubt.   And — oh, yeah, this last bit seems germane — all these antics seem to be happening only in Democrat-run cities in these swing states."

Stephen Green at Vodkapundit also comments: "What does it take to get the press to notice an election being stolen in broad daylight?    Answer: A new press."

It's not that the presidential race wasn't close.  It was.  The vote counters in those unnamed cities include a criminal class.

Masks are used to identify your tribe.

 

There are places you must wear masks to receive service or avoid punishment.  However, when you see masked people driving and cycling about and walking by themselves because they want to, you are being told what tribe they belong to and probably who they will vote for too.

You know who these people identify with.

Simple math puts TRUMP first for Nov 3 2020

 In 2016 Trump won.
What changed since then?
The Never-Trumpers left at the time but I haven't heard of new leavers since 2016.
I have heard of no Trump voters who are turning their backs on him.

The people who voted Trump last time are out in boat and car parades, ready to vote for Trump again.
I read stories about people who held their nose and voted Trump in 2016 but will crawl over broken glass to vote for him this time.
There's a small movement of people out of the Democrat fold under the flag "Walk Away".
A few more states have purged voter rolls of dead or merely departed voters, a few whom were somehow voting, and largely voting Democrat.
There's a definite increase in support from Black Americans.
There seem to be longer lines to vote this time and the enthusiasm factor seems to be mostly Republican, or more correctly, "Trump".

Whatever the final tally for the 2020 election, there will be more Trump voters this time than 2016.
Last time the polls were out a lot but at the last minute got better for Trump.
This time the polls are out even more and at the last minute are getting better for Trump.
For the run-up, pollsters have their elbow on the scales for their preferred party, Democrat.
For the showdown, pollsters protect their reputation by being more truthy at the last minute.
The numbers have been TRUMP for some time, despite the Covid shock.

And wins the popular vote.

 

COVID Cases vs Deaths, 6 million database

From issuesinsights.com, two of the charts.  You already knew deaths are almost all old people and sick ones at that.  What you haven't seen is that almost all "cases" are young and middle-aged .  Those anxious old folks are the least likely to catch COVID.

Gettysburg address: 266 words Price of Cabbage: 26,911 words

 Words cloak and reveal.  "To the point" is usually short and easy to understand.

New food and habitat in our oceans: Plastic.

 Plastic garbage accumulating in our oceans, much of it sourced from Asian rivers, is food and shelter for microbes.   From Hansen's article:  "Pelagic plastic (plastic floating in the oceans), exposed to the sun and the waves, breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces which in turn are literally eaten by microbes – such as bacteria....  “The natural system finds a way to use most everything – in the case of oceanic plastics, as homes and food.”

An alarmist researcher wrote this:“Trillions of plastic debris fragments are afloat at sea, creating the “perfect storm” for microbial colonization. Introduced more than 50 years ago, plastic substrates are a novel microbial habitat in the world’s oceans. This “plastisphere” consists of a complex community comprised of bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic microorganisms and microscopic animals.”

Hansen observes mildly:  "What does that mean when we get up in the morning? It means that sea creatures of all types – tiny, mostly microscopic, little plants and animals – start living on the surface of these bits of plastic that are floating around in the ocean. The bits become floating homes for these creatures and plants."  And this:  "The plastic bits, found in the top layers of the oceans, supply a happy home for lots of microscopic “bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic microorganisms and microscopic animals” – a home that didn’t exist (as far as the researchers know) before".
      He's not loving him some garbage, however.  "Remember, just because Nature will clean up our messes, given enough time, we should keep all of our trash, including plastics, contained and disposed of properly. None of it should end up in the sea. "

Truth needs someone to love it.

Truth has no arms and legs.  Truth changes nothing until someone loves it.
Think:  Epstein revelations, Hillary's hard drive, Biden junior's laptop, The Panama Papers.
Some thought "Bombshells", "This will change everything!".
Mostly that was wishful thinking, naivete.
Sadly the American FBI figures in this story.  Delivering information to the FBI that leaders don't want means that information is suppressed, not elevated.  

Truth needs someone to love it.

A quote from Marshall McLuhan:

“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” - Marshall McLuhan

Does this amuse you?

 This pronunciation salad reached us the same way as common law arrived.  It's a survival grab-bag of what has worked over the years.  It's not a result of putting a meritocracy in charge of running language, schools and public spaces.     

The credentialed like to harmonize everything with one or two of their own ideas.  The other viewpoint is pragmatic and accepts what has worked in the past and has room for what may work better in the future..   One will probably vote for Biden.  The other will probably vote for Trump.

You don't think the power grid can be wrecked by hackers for years? Watch the video.

 The power grid can be destroyed for years.  Take it seriously.  A 2007 US Government test saw a generator go up in smoke when attacked by a data clip no bigger than a .gif      It happened in seconds.  The poison data attacked a relay and told it to do the opposite of what it should do.    There's even a sobering video.  The same technique was used by Russian state hackers a few years later to damage the Ukraine's electricity supply.

As the source story at WIRED says,
How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator

I do a couple cryptics every day.

 How did I go so wrong.

Update: Some problems can be solved by ignoring rules:

Another famous example:  Legend says whoever could untangle the Gordian knot that anchored a cart ....  would become ruler of all Asia.  Alexander "The Great" used a sword.

 

Surviving but not fit

 While the social contract holds, we are fitter than ever before.  Individually we are not.  Most of us have fewer survival and handyman skills, are overweight and understrength, and are nudged into safer paths where we can't accidentally be hurt or forced to exert all our strength or to react swiftly.  Think of bicycle helmets on quiet paths,  automatic braking on new cars,  warnings about playing with plastic bags, four-way stop signs and roundabouts,  masks and isolation when hazards are absent,  clothes that don't catch fire,  sidewalks dished for wheelchairs at intersections, pill lids that don't come off easily, road warnings about construction 2 km ahead when I only need five or ten seconds to get a message and respond.   The average grip of an adult is weaker than it used to be.  Most of us weigh more than our parents at the same age.  Probably a majority of us have worked at jobs that didn't require heavy breathing and hard muscle work and even those of us who do have better tools and pallet jacks and electric drills.   I don't want to be rid of most of this stuff.  But I see I'm less fit to survive as an individual when my entire work and play environment has been made safer.   No problem if we all agree to get along and work together.  "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has replaced the milder form known as "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and is pointing to a breakdown of the social contract.

 

 

Vegan Burritos

 

Barrett without notes, Hirono deep in workbook notes.

Sax duet with his own echo in a pipe, nice beat.

 

 

Asking the questions no one else asks: What numbers were on the Beagle Boy's prison uniforms?

 Chiefly 1,6,7 and some fuzzy lines on Uncle Scrooge's robbers.

Space News October 2020

 NASA SATELLITE CATCHES AVALANCE HAPPENING ON MARS.

TOUR THE BENNU ASTEROID just before US probe lands.  It's the size of a football field and you can see every bit of rock and rubble on its surface in exquisite detail, rotated past your eyes in 3D.

LIFE INSIDE THE SUN?  A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT LIFE FORM PROPOSED

The author posits that the ability to copy itself is a way to define life.  

It all depends on how you define life. If the key criteria are the ability to encode information, and the ability for those information carriers to self-replicate faster than they disintegrate, then hypothetical monopole particles threaded on cosmic strings - cosmic necklaces - could form the basis of life inside stars, much like DNA and RNA form the basis of life on Earth.

LOOKING BACKWARDS THROUGH A TELESCOPE?   NASA scientists  took telescope imagery of our sun and have been analyzing it viewed from the wrong end of the telescope to see if sunspot changes could be detectable in a low-pixel image that we get of distant stars that might have habitable planets..

In a new study, scientists looked at sunspots – darkened patches on the Sun caused by its magnetic field – at low resolution as if they were trillions of miles away. What resulted was a simulated view of distant stars, which can help us understand stellar activity and the conditions for life on planets orbiting other stars. “We wanted to know what a sunspot region would look like if we couldn’t resolve it in an image,”

 ORGANICS IN UPPER VENUS' ATMOSPHERE.  This is a big surprise.  It appears a wet Venus may have been lived on before runaway heat and acid messed it up.  Scans of the upper atmosphere have detected Phosphine.  Only the presence of life seems to explain it.    

 What if some hardy viral or bacterial life survives, bounced around high in the atmosphere in the last livable patch of Venus?

PEOPLE ON MARS:     Lockheed Martin announced a few years ago a plan to have a space station with humans orbiting Mars for 2028.   Hmmm.   Elon Musk is planning to get people there soon and acknowledges some will die.  He hopes, however,  that the first settlers will die comfortable.  From a Sept 2020 interview:  

“If I can go to Mars and be a human guinea pig, I’m willing to sort of donate my body to science. I feel like it’s worth it for me personally, and it’s kind of a selfish thing, but just to turn around and look and see Earth. That’s a lifelong total dream.”

NASA has been studying the technnology to support manned Mars missions.  For one thing, the equipment has to be overcome more gravity.    SPACE-EX is gearing up to send people to Mars too.

MINING TRILLIONS FROM ASTEROIDS.    Be sceptical but not too much.  Just divide the numbers by about 100.   Rare earths are one of the targets.    "The first trillionaire will be made in space"    How about "Quintillionaires"?  Money 101 says that what is scarce is expensive.  "Rare" is a clue to scarcity.  If it's common, it will be cheaper.     When Spaniards grabbed the gold hoards of South America, there was inflation in Europe as the gold spread around..  But it wasn't really inflation of the cost of bread but deflation of the value of gold which had suddenly become more common.  Interestingly, this Inca gold was gradually traded out of Europe and off to China and India back in the day, with spices, silk and crockery coming in exchange. (I've read a wondrous book that included this topic, The Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel.

NORTHERN LIGHTS ON OTHER PLANETS.  This is news to me but not to people who follow the topic.  The Aurora Borealis has been seen on every plant with a magnetic field and a dense atmosphere of whatever.

WE WEREN'T SUCKED INTO A MICROSCOPIC BLACK HOLE.

This is actually news.  NASA Science references the speculation with this:

Switching on the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, did not trigger the creation of a microscopic black hole. And that black hole did not start rapidly sucking in surrounding matter faster and faster until it devoured the Earth, as sensationalist news reports had suggested it might.

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland reached some new collision energies and is shut at the moment for some maintenance but will be back on shortly with a further increase.  In September they reported bouncing light off light  (and created a form of matter from it!) for the first time.

MORE SPACE NEWS    July   June   May  April   

Tour the Space Station: Astronaut gal takes you room by room through the ISS, including how to pee and how to scrunch up in Soyuz for the trip home. Great narration made me smile

 

BENNU Tour an asteroid, see every rock, just before US probe touches down.

 This 3D tour of the BENNU asteroid (the size of a football field) inspires awe.  The detail is exquisite

Add caption

 

 

Getting older: A few leaves still to fall

 Below each maple is the summer's CV,  reddened leaves.  Here's the narrative to date, clustered on the hard ground, lovely little bits that we remember of the tree's life this summer past.  And there's some more tale to be told and ready to fall. But not a lot.  

Seasons over. Looking good

 That's my life today.  Much is past and accomplishments of not much note are still pretty to look at.  What's left to live looks lovely too.  For some trees most is already on the ground.  Even a single scarlet and leather leaf twiddling down in the breeze is worth appreciating.

Last leaf is worth appreciating too