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

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