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

China spending millions planning Taiwan President attack.

 This site appears to be for real in Inner Mongolia:  A mock-up of the presidential palace area in Taiwan for practice attacks.  China doesn't love peace unless it's peace on its terms.  Everything else is lies.   You know Taiwan isn't going to attack China.  (linked from Baldings World twitter feed.)

Trees Feasting on Sky, Drinking the Earth.

 Have you ever wondered why you don't see pits in the ground around every big tree?  Skiers know about snow pits around trees but the big question is "Where the heck did all that wood come from?  Where are the dirt pits?"

Trees eat sky.  The wood is made of cellulose which is made of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.  The carbon doesn't come from the earth.   Carbon is consumed from the sky.  A forest doesn't go hunting for its dinner.  It eats the air that comes to it freely, sucking it in through every leaf pore, packing away the carbon from the trace carbon dioxide and leaving the oxygen part  of the CO2 to drift further.

The dinner menu according to Wikipedia : 
(Note how tiny the edible portion is, 0.04% and almost two thirds of those table crumbs is the oxygen part of the CO2.).  While some of our colleagues are frantic about excess CO2, our green brethren are full of joy at the feast and in fact crops we plant are up and forest volumes expanding. (A related article here at carbonbrief.org.)

By volume, dry air contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide

The composition of wood: 

The chemical composition of wood varies from species to species, but is approximately 50% carbon, 42% oxygen, 6% hydrogen, 1% nitrogen, and 1% other elements .. by weight.

The formula for cellulose:

        Chains of C6H10O5

Great Barrington Declaration: 4000 health professionals call for Focused Protection and Immediate return to normal.

Called the Great Barrington Declaration, the group issued a letter saying “as infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. “Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. “Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”

Reported at legalinsurrection.  Links to the credentialed signatories are at the site. (Three professors from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford respectively take the lead.)
Also called out:  "Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health....Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity."

 And in summary:  "Allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection."