Space News July 2020

Comet NEOWISE will probably be visible to the naked eye later this month.  It brightened by 2.2 magnitudes in four days as it heads behind the sun. (June 30th report).

Expand to view cross-eyed

Noctilucent clouds are prominent this season, now in 3D.  About 80 km high at the edge of space, the couple- kilometer-thin layer of puffs of meteor dust was cleverly photographed by two friends who lived 120 km apart.  They doctored the joint imagery so you can glimpse the 3 D structure of the clouds.  If you cross eyes properly, you can see for yourself.

Mercury isn't a comet but it has a tail, a faint one of sodium vapour. From AstroBob: Day-side temperatures run to 450C and night-side to -170C. Heat strips heavy atoms.  Sodium scatters sunlight well so it is a good target. Solar wind pushes the atoms away to form a faint tail.  Italian amateur astronomer, Alessandrini, took the photo.   (There's an SF story about Mercury in which the perpetually turned away side was named "June" because "What is so rare as a day in June".)



A detailed colour-coded geologic map of the entire moon has been published. There is zoom-in detail available on line.  See expanded article at EarthSky.org

How much room does the Universe have to record information about itself?  This overlaps the question, can the universe be self-aware?  This PBS ten-minute Space Time talk eyeballs it.    (Black holes feature prominently). Information  capacity is proportional to surface area, not volume.  The smallest unit imagined that may be used for a mark is a Planck unit.  This leads to an eyeball number of 10¹⁸⁰ Planck units in the universe and some eyeball calculations that match a Planck unit to each element in the visible universe.  The conclusion, a great deal of self-reporting is possible.          This is an interesting question.   The mass of our ideation is tiny and an improbable event, the child of a child of an improbable vortex of probability, yet somehow consequential.  As one author wrote, we weren't predicted but the universe expected something like us would be along.

A treasonous few have the bullhorn but they will not prevail. Michael Flynn describes today's attacks on America.

Posted in the Western Journal by Michael Flynn:

'I was once told if we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.
The more I’ve thought about this phrase, the more I believe it. There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. These passionate 2 percent appear to be winning.'

Flynn was going to investigate billions of off-the-books money
that Brennan and friends managed.

'The attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions. This weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.'

OpenRAN: A new way to advance 5G to beat Huawei subsidized attacks

Open Radio Access Network is being developed in the US.  This lets you pick and choose 5G system elements from different suppliers and have them work together, while saving a lot of money.  Huawei but also Nokia and Ericsson only sell package systems, not elements.  This makes prices higher and also makes it easier for a state actor like Huawei to make below-market forays into other nations. The mix and match networking has price points below the system pricing.

I didn't know the Pentagon has a $200,000,000 5G budget and this is helping researchers.
OpenRAN information from this article in the Washington Post.

Send Money!

Canada has a Receiver General whose chief purpose is to receive money.  I'm told that one of the first banks in the USA started by putting out a sign, "Deposits Accepted".  This joker has the right idea, offering to protect people from bad thoughts.

Old Mice Gain Muscle and Lose Fat When ATB Receptor Is Prompted. Humans Have Similar Pathway.

Maybe not too good to be true:  Brown fat in mice has a lot of ATB sensors which when prompted, signal a burn off to the brown fat.   Muscle tissue has some of the same receptors.  When those ones are signaled, more muscle tissue is laid down.  This is a "two-fer" made in heaven if it safely works on seniors who could lose fat and bulk up muscle at the same time.  The net result in the mice was a slight loss of weight and a younger figure.  The mice burned almost 50% more oxygen and the healthy changes were in place after just four weeks. The conclusion, of course, is that more research is needed. Research by Prof. Dr. Alexander Pfeifer from the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University Hospital Bonn summarized at Science Daily.

Three Gorges Dam End of Life Approaching; UPDATE

This photo published in Epoch Times shows Three Gorges dam appears to have deformed in the last ten years.  China at first said the photo was deformed by digital processing.  Another party said the dam is built of blocks linked to each other, not massively anchored to bed rock and the movement is plausible.  Chinese academia thinks the dam should expect a 50 year life time.   Twenty million people live downstream.  Best case may be another 40 years.

UPDATE: I leave this image up but it's wrong. The image below I was able to verify however.

UPDATE:   When did this start?  Google Earth shows a computer generated picture of the dam, not the real dam.

Covid Suits Democrats. Good Change Will Come In Second In November.

Covid suits Democrats.
-Covid can hide a Demented Biden from the public and protect him from Trump with a Zoom type debate.
-Covid gives cover to suppressing Trump's mass rallies and demonizing them if it can't suppress them.
-Covid covers having no convention at all to keep disaffected Bernie followers off the air and to hide defective Biden from voters.
-Covid isolation measures keep voters from free and open exchanges outside the curated news stage.
-Covid gives cover for the coup de grace of mail in voting to save lives.  This disaster favours the party most prepared to cheat as the distribution, storage and collection of votes falls outside bipartisan supervision.
-Covid hype that is used to keep some states shut down will continue to damage the economy and money troubles move votes away from the party in power. Thus, democrat run states will be last to open.

This sad tally comes from The Conservative Tree House.
I've rarely felt less hope for the United States of America.
Changes to make America more dynamic, safer, just and profitable for its people are also on the move.
Looks like they will place second.

Aggressive China Has Disputes With 18 Bordering Countries.

See map.  As noted, this doesn't include troubles inside the conquered territories.  This is reported in Indiatvnews.com

Black Lives Matter Outrage Mostly Comes Not From Black Lives.

A Pew report finds scarcely one person in six is black at those BLM rallies and protests.
Five out of six are not Republicans.
The tan bars show the % of the general census each BLM group stems from.

Those Strzok Notes: Obama and Biden Doing Dirty

And a plausible transcript (Conservative Tree House).

Where do migrants with inventions to their credit go? From China (and Canada, India, France the UK and Germany) to the United States. Overwhelmingly.

Understanding Lockdown In Your Area

Why didn't I think of that? Father's Day GIF gem

I'm having trouble reading the news

BLM protesting the bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea. See FBI chart.

Best explanation of the chart: The shooting death of a black man by a white police officer is NOT what drives BLM.

Exquisite detail. If Tolkien built model railroad scenery, this is how he would have done it.

This video is called "A Scenic Overhaul - Yorkshire Dales Model Railway"  I watched the grass grow and the road age with my jaw dropped.  I want to live in such a world, a sweeter one than this.

Genius solution: How to hug your embarrassed pre-teens in public.

Easy when they are little.
Takes a touch of genius
to carry it into middle school.

A friend's boys had reached a certain age. When Mom gave them a hug as she dropped them off to school, they were so embarrassed.  Her brilliant and simple solution was to tell them, "I need the hug.  Tell them your Mom needs it".   It worked and they hug her to this day as grown ups.
   

What's wrong with this picture? 001

This photo is a charmer and it is posed to look accidental.  I see only one cat has had a chance to take a lick.  That means the camera was at the ready.  The milk puddle doesn't look like any spill I ever made with far flung tiny drops in some direction.  Instead, it has neat boundaries as if carefully poured onto the floor.  The bright yellow mug is bone dry!  It was laid on its side to complete the composition.  Yet, I love the picture and the four creatures are doing something that comes naturally.  They aren't trying to lie to me.  But the photographer is deliberately making one thing look like another thing.

Government Isn't Big Enough! Doxxers, BLM, AntiFa and the Twitter Mobs are the Wild West, Beyond the Remit of Law.

Cheap social media create mobs that live outside the remit of Law and Order.   Congress and Parliament are not designed to rule these powerful flash alliances.   Congress and Parliament's response is measured in days and months while the challenges form up on the scale of hours and days.  The alliances occur within political parties and corporations and restaurant staffs and newsroom people.  They are becoming the first line of influence and power in our societies.  And they are the wild wild west that cowboy flicks told tales about.   The closest we have to a sheriff is Donald Trump.      Money always go where it gets the biggest result and these extra-judicial alliances are gaining wealth and the power to redistribute wealth.

Red China has made progress bringing this under control with millions of cameras, social scores for every individual.  These scores determine whether you can buy a plane or bus ticket even.  Closer to home, we have people in power who are falling in love with the prospect of doing the same, starting with instructions on how everyone should breathe and where they should walk, contact tracing software and who they should associate with in a time of Covid.   The CCP or Wuhan flu has motivated men and women who should love freedom but prefer power.