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.