Space News April 2020

Artists version from Science Daily

1.   There is a flash of light BRIGHTER THAN A TRILLION STARS, every twelve years.  In galaxy OJ 287 a black hole (150 million solar masses) is zinging around one of the biggest ever found (18 billion solar masses).  Every twelve years the little one grazes the big one's disk.  The Spitzer telescope was on the other side of the sun for the predicted date of July 31 2019 and recorded what Earth bound astronomers could not.   Picture a NASCAR crash with sparks flying as the chassis scrapes against a wall.  Then replace it with the image of the light of a trillion stars exploding into view inside a single galaxy, over and over again.  That galaxy may be nearly sterile, the last place we'd want to go looking for intelligent life.  Science Daily

2.    Comet ATLAS made the news and then fell apart and those pieces too, just as it was getting bright enough to see with the naked eye.   Great picture from the Hubble








3.   Comet SWAN is incoming.  Just discovered two weeks ago when it burped some hydrogen, it has rapidly reached magnitude +5.5 and is just barely visible to the eye April 29th.  It appears to have been bumped towards the inner solar system for the first time ever. Maybe we will all get
to see it.    Spaceweather 













4.   A big rock flew by today.  It didn't miss by a mile.  It missed by millions of miles and is only news because it is big.  Named OR1998  (the year it was first identified) it is a couple kilometers wide and tumbling.   You can see the list of all asteroids down to about 5 metres diameter that are coming anywhere near earth by checking the list at Spaceweather.com for updates.  What's interesting is the Arecibo observatory made a radar film.





5.    Is Space-Time Smooth Or Chunky?

Or is gravity particular at the smallest scale?  A clever measurement has moved the decimal point over.  The answer is still "apparently not".  Light from a wobbly pulsar beam some ten billion light years distant was measured for energy spread.  The tool they used is called ESPRESSO.  The rationale:

"If space-time really is frothy and bubbling, then this should affect anything passing through space-time. For example, a beam of light going along its merry way will encounter all sorts of microscopic bumps and jostles — a Planckian gravel path rather than a smooth highway.  Sometimes those little jostles will give the light a boost, nudging up its energy level, and sometimes the light will encounter a little speed bump, slowing it down. The net effect is that light traveling through a frothy space-time will slowly spread out in energy. This effect is incredibly, incredibly minute, so tiny we couldn't possibly hope to measure it in a laboratory. But thankfully, nature can provide a laboratory for us. If we can find a nice, coherent beam of light in space (in other words, a natural space laser), and that beam of light travels over billions of years to our telescopes, we can measure the spread in energy and use that to measure the frothiness of space-time."  (They found it and found a cloud in front of it with iron atoms that absorbed light in a precise way.)

For General Flynn, here at last is the smoking gun.

General Flynn was just about the first casualty when the Deep State turned on Trump and his people.
I never expected Priestap's words to be so plainly evil. Only a journalist or Democratic politician can fail to see what's going on here.

"What is our goal?" he muses.
"Truth/Admission
or to get him to lie so we can
prosecute him or get him fired."

This is moving the Overton Window, adding weight to whatever is revealed next.









UPDATE 1:

UPDATE 2:

Believing stuff that isn't so: Jumping cactus and viral doom.

We make up stories to explain stuff.   In the Okanagan, a lot of people believe in Jumping Cactus. Why?  Because they cross a patch of desert and find cactus bits stuck to their pants.  Do they look at the cactus closely to see what mechanism gave it muscles?  Do they wonder how come the vegetable kingdom is acting like the animal kingdom?  No.  They make up a story and tell others.
I like a good story too but this one just isn't so, as Reagan said.

Bits of cactus stick to the back of my shoe.  My foot has a little snap forward at each step and the cactus is sticking from my shoe on a spine, a sort of springy pole vault.  Up she goes.

 Viruses are tiny but they don't work by magic. They can't live outside you for many hours and they don't have jet packs to get around.    They have to be physically shipped across the space between you and they need to do it while they are fresh.  That means that most of the outdoors is almost absolutely safe everywhere at all times, if you aren't up close to people.  And if no one has been there for a few days, the viruses are screwed and dead.

None of this means compromised seniors should be casual about infection.  Absolutely not.  But for the rest of the population, a little common sense, please.   There are thousands of KINDS of bacteria and virus making their home in you all the time, you're never without them.    Purity isn't the goal.

Babylon Bee: some greatest hits

Best Babylon Bee satires in recent weeks..

If you have ever had a political opinion, been to church or been married, you'll like their stuff.

Wild Wild West Dot Com - You've neighbors you didn't ask for

Thousands of people who care nothing for me are now my neighbors.   They vote me up and down at will when I appear in the digital swamp. They give me a jingle from the call centre and email me from Kenya.   Seems like the whole world is ready to put in their two cents for free.    It’s the Wild Wild West.com

It's complicated

Back in the day in village and tribe, we met our neighbors every week and were probably kin.  We took great interest in their sexual unions, their work and kids, status, belief and doings.  Without written law, we apparently shaped life with story-telling, shaming, kinship rules and brute force.    True, we now have nations and clubs and corporations  complete with  recorded  votes,  constitutions, patent law, health officers and enforcement officers.

But we’re simultaneously back in the village, an increasingly global culture, thanks to the speed of light.   The word "neighbor" is built around the word "nigh" or "near" and everyone with a cell phone is now near you.  Though we be thousands of miles apart, we can connect in less than a second and pay less than a penny for the touch.  So we're neighbors now. “Connect”  means “reach out to” and “like”.   It also means “target”.  (Think “deplatforming” and “doxing”).

Our institutions haven’t caught up. They are somewhat hierarchical.  The internet neighborhood is a looser network that admits initiatives from a lot of nodes.  The second is becoming more important than the first.  Managing what happens in your information neighborhood is getting to be as powerful and important for safety, wealth and health as voting for your MP and Senator.  Somehow managing the information neighborhood and managing the geographic neighborhood must co-exist.  The impetus for change is arriving at the speed of light.  Institutions will be playing catch up.

Story-telling, shaming, rules of association and force have regained great power.  How do we tame and civilize them?

Pill reminder, better than postit notes

Make this pill reminder at home for free and brag a little.
I drew seven circles in a clump,using the pill bottle base
and labelled them Monday to Sunday.
When I take a pill, I put the pill bottle down on tomorrow's date.
That's all. 
If the pill bottle is sitting on today,
I haven't taken it yet.
 I was having a hard time remembering at 11 pm
if I had taken the pill at 8pm or was it the day before?

This won't work for everyone but is great for a single prescription.  Someone could print a bunch of these on plastic and sell them by the dozen.

Google lies to you every day

Ground-breaking stories on the US food chain in a time of Coronaviryus have been posted on Conservative Tree House.   Google makes sure you and I don't hear from them.  They don't fake the story, they hide conservative sourced information.   Have a look for yourself:



The search term is
"conservative tree house food chain"
in GOOGLE and DUCK DUCK GO..
Google acknowledges the site exists (but not the topic) in fifth position.  Duck recognizes the site and the topic for all five top spots.

Who knows what you watch on the internet? Touché from Dilbert

Chernobyl Came Back As Bat Virus: History Doesn't Repeat But It Rhymes.

"To report that 15,000-30,000 people have died, when the actual number is 56, represents a big error.     (snip)      The greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information."   [Michael Crichton  Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management]

US Coronavirus deaths were modelled at 1.7 million, then at 270,000 or so, then at 100,000 and now less again.  The original high number has sort of faded from the news.  The plan to flatten the curve has sort of faded too, now that emergency rooms are underutilized, but the lockdowns and 'alarums' persist.   The story editing has all happened in the last ten weeks.

Apparently against every Coronavirus death it makes sense to write off hundreds of millions of dollars, disregard individual rights and call for extreme measures.  Last year, 34,000 people in the US died from Influenza A and B but a few million dollars at most was spent that year against those deaths. People went about their lives with fewer edicts handed down from experts armed with models and armed with political beliefs as well.  Very smart people can be very wrong.  Sometimes knowing how smart you are insulates you from self examination.

Back to Michael Crichton:

Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods? (and pandemics [ed]) No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule. At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days.

That reference to Chernobyl?  I also read the book Midnight in Chernobyl, not relying on the Chrichton quote.

Cat humor in a time of Coronavirus

Found at Instapundit's open comment page.

Not Knowing Is Okay

Not knowing stuff is okay.  This applies to the question, "Is there life after death?" and "If you died tonight, do you know where you'd go?"      My experience says "No" but isn't probative.  Newton's mechanics does a nice job explaining how a satellite orbits the world but doesn't explain time, light  and the shape of space around black holes.  So, all my personal proof is against "Life after death" and that's enough for now.  Maybe someday an Einstein of the Afterlife will explain it.

Richard Feynman speaks for me:

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

The last little bit I don't have an opinion on:  "Without any purpose, which is the way it really is ...."

Be a gentleman and treat her like a lady:

Courtesy gets bad press today.  Holding a door open to let the lady enter first can trigger rebukes. But I recommend it.  The ladies who don't like that can say so but it doesn't make our world a kinder place.

My mother put "scientist, husband, gentleman" on my father's gravestone. Over the years she told me to be a gentleman.  This meant taking my hat off in the presence of a lady, giving her my seat if none are free, holding the door for her and letting her enter first, keeping to the curb side of the walk so her clothes wouldn't be splashed with mud from passing wagons, being a shield if there's trouble, not making her shake my hand, keeping a leash on my tongue even if scolded, reaching first to pay, and volunteering to do out-in-front dangerous and heavy stuff.  A lot of it stuck.

Why not?  A little structure makes relationships easier to launch and sands down some of the rough spots which are plentiful in all of us.

I recently lost my wife of twelve years.  We had nine years of honeymoon and three of marriage.  By that, I mean, we occasionally walked without holding hands and I didn't always open the car door for her.  So, nine years honeymoon, three years of a good marriage.

Would you believe, there's a web site to generate your own "change my mind" meme.

Don't believe news about the end of the world. It's complicated.

Don't be an information victim. Embrace diversity instead of shutting it down with rules.   This article on complex systems upends the fear -mongering news which is always nattering about the end of the world and need for drastic measures and new values.   http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Fear,%20Complexity,%20&%20Environmental%20Management%20in%20the%2021st%20Century.htm

"Explains everything"

Read about Yellowstone Park management and weep.

Haemoglobin molecle with detail suppressed

Check out some of those flow charts explaining how the world works and then take a look at the picture of a haemoglobin molecule, thousands of times more complex than the explanation deemed sufficient for the whole world.

Y2K?  Chernobyl?  Coronavirus?  Population Bomb?  The world will freeze?
What actually happened compared to the panic headlines and books?   Oops, I included Coronavirus before the consensus moved on.

Colour shows electrical variation in a working heart
at one moment of the cycle.  Try to put that on paper.

A Hierarchy of Heterarchies Saving Us From Excesses of Coronaviralism And Acronymic Despots

Astonishingly, President Trump has promoted federalism over a unitary executive for the economy to recover. His guidelines have stirred very little acrimony because they sound responsible.  They leave all implementation to the invididual states but define a metric, just like "weights and measures" is a core job of central government.  ( Article 1 Section 8, Congress shall have power "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". )

  Christopher DeMuth of the Hudson Institute writes:

Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government and to the transfer of federal power from Congress to the executive branch. This time, the federal response rests largely on state and local government and private enterprise, with a wave of deregulation clearing the way. The Trump administration has seized no new powers, and Congress has stayed energetically in the game. .... When asked why he has not issued orders for nationwide home and business lockdowns, he has emphasized that the intensity of the epidemic varies widely and is best met by calibrated state and local judgments—and added pointedly that such steps would conflict with the Constitution.

This is consistent with Presdent Trump's approach to international deals, calling for bilateral and multilateral agreements instead of relying on a centralizing formula with WTO, UN, WHO, International Court and so on.

Look up "Heterarchy".    He opts for heterarchy over hierarchy.  A little more accurate is a slightly disordered hierarchy of heterarchies, to describe the whole field of world trade and the whole of US federalism.  A heterarchy has redundancy with some nodes having more than one way of influencing more distant nodes.  A hierarchy allows top-down control.

Some light peeking through the fog of coronavirus war

Check out the NY Post article whose title says it all:
"Coronavirus going to hit its peak and start falling sooner than you think".
https://nypost.com/2020/03/08/coronavirus-going-to-hit-its-peak-and-start-falling-sooner-than-you-think/

There are parallels between tulip bulb mania and the quarantine orders ramping up like atomic bombs.competing to go off first.  And yet some places in China and Iran had corpses lying in the street waiting to be picked up.  God grant us a little time (months) to sort out the data and work up prophylaxis and vaccine.

We are emerging from a fog of deliberate misinformation and a fog of general data disarray.  The scariest factor apart from the danger to the health-compromised elderly is our own reaction.   Our willingness to believe the worst, to believe that that which we greatly feared has come upon us.  Our institutional impulse to out-virtue the competition by being more resolutely cautious than it.  Our atavistic inclination to fear strangers and prefer our tribe and family above all others.

Goodbye Never Trumper. Hello Never Bernies.

This prediction is like shooting ducks in a barrel.  Lots of Democrats are going to vote Trump this time round.    "I'm doing okay personally and will survive four more years of orange-man-bad until the (D) party gets its shit together..

Two good cups of coffee from one Keurig K cup (Update)

When you know the first four ounces of coffee are strongest, the rest is easy.  Run 4 ounces into my cup.  Then 8 ounces into my wife's cup.  Then 4 more ounces into my cup.   Strong enough for great coffee taste, a little milder than one original cup.  Costco sells their brand of coffee for about 40 cents/K cup.  This split takes you to 20 cents/cup, competitive with brew-from-scratch.

Update:  My wife suggests a tweak:  Drip all 16 ounces of coffee at once into something hot.  Then pour two 8 ounce cups to get a perfectly matched pair of drinks.    BTW, a hot cup for a hot drink keeps it hot far longer.  I like to pour really hot water from the tap or kettle into the cups, dumping it back out when I'm ready to make the coffee.

Did Google lie or leave a poison pill when support for Windows 7 ended January 14th?

I took a screen shot of Windows7 goodbye message to me on the 14th.
That night, I shut the computer as usual.
On the night of the 15th, as I tried to shut down, Windows took over to make 5 updates.
What was that about?

Did they "misspeak"?
Or did they add a poison pill to force me out of Windows7 in a while?
If I trusted the Windows people, I wouldn't speculate.

Manimals and Feminals

Men and women are compound. WHO we are is an emergent operating system that manages the WHAT we are.   The WHAT is sexually-specialized human mammals that have their own operating system.  The former is like Windows.  The latter is like DOS.  Let's call the latter Manimals and Feminals.  Manimals and Feminals have their own agenda and it's alway on, evaluating each other for sexual fitness and survival.       The Manimals and Feminals are top dog in a cellular society of billions (which is hosting and trading with trillions of viruses and bacteria). Those cells have delegated some of their survival to the M and F.  (The organs can be hexadecimal codes and the cells can be binary bits in this metaphor .)  The M and F have delegated a lot of their survival to the operant personalities.    All are having their say everywhere all the time.   This renders humourous our wondrous society so that compound beings are arranging a coffee rendezvous to plan a Christmas party but evaluating M &F breasts and muscle at the same time, while also oxygenating blood and purging wastes in a largely unconscious manner.  They don't quite fit together but we kind of blink at the spots where operating systems are in conflict.  We do the same every day and night with waking and dreaming, blinking and forgetting as required, so the narrative works out.

Culture, family and government are losing layers of management. Big changes coming.

Cheap speed-of-light communication is doing away with layers of management. The person at the end of the line is almost as informed as the person at the front of the line, and can make decisions accordingly.  Large corporations (which have only existed for a few centuries) have shed layers of management but less obviusly government and culture are doing the same.  In large corporations, there are fewer subsidiary bosses than fifty years ago.  Government with layers of senators, elected representatives, ministries, committees, lobbyists, parties and NGO's are being faced with the same challenge.  The voter on the street can easily be more informed than elected representatives were a hundred years ago.  The same challenge is happening in culture, and is especially so for the narratives that hold society together to share common values about what family is for, about children, about life and death.

What does it meant to lose a layer of management in culture?  For one thing, kids are educated in a monoculture with a few adults and hundreds of data -bleeding peers.  For another thing, kids from a one child parent family who are in turn descended from a child of a one parent family.......have no siblings, no brothers and sisters.  They also have no aunts and no uncles and no cousins.  The nuclear family has parents and grandparents and everybody elese is society.   This in turn means that government and popular culture are being recruited to structure what faith and kinship used to look after.   Neither is properly fit for such a role and both will change profoundly and rapidly over the next few tens of years.